The Golden Republic
by MSK42
Summary: California, born from the fires of rebellion, has gained independence in the year 1836. With the potential for limitless growth, but a world changing rapidly and not always for the better, it falls to those governing the nation to steer the ship of state towards the golden horizon, and navigate the uncharted waters of a changing world to greatness. (Now with an extended timeline!)
1. Prologue

The end of the Northern Rebellions, the Rebeliones del norte as they were called in Mexico, had come to a very unhappy conclusion for Mexico. What started as two unrestful regions, Alta California and the northern half of Coahuila y Tejas, had broken away from Mexico entirely into two independent nations. The latter had become the Republic of Texas, governed by Samuel Houston. And the former had reorganized itself into the California Republic, a vast nation that covered more than 1,200,000 square kilometers of North America yet was sparsely populated. It held vast mineral reserves, capacity for staggering agricultural production, and some of the most beautiful natural landscapes of any part of the world.

The thing of it was, no one really knew this at the time. Since the days of Spanish colonization, what was now California had been ignored by both the Spanish Empire and then Mexico after independence. Mexico had held such little interest in Alta California that they had invited American settlers to settle the land for them. They had created small settlements along the coast, and a handful in the interior. Even as the rebellion had dawned in 1832, there were only 30,000 Anglo-Californians, 7,000 Hispanic-Californians, and somewhere on the order of 20,000 natives all through the interior. In total, California had approximately 60,000 people, comparable to the nearly 70,000 in Texas.

Many considered California and Texas to be sister nations, born out of rebellion from Mexico. The two, though, were sisters only in circumstance. Texas had been settled by men from the south of the United States, and many had brought their slaves. As such, the Republic of Texas had many slaves at the time of its independence, and Texas had legalized slavery within its borders. California, however, had been settled by men from the northern United States, and had carried their anti-slavery attitudes with them. At the start of independence in 1836, there were 236 Afro-Californians, and not one of them was enslaved, with the Seventh Amendment of the California Constitution proclaiming slavery illegal in the new republic. And unlike Texas, where one of the principal calls for independence was that Mexico had banned slavery, California had declared independence out of a new sense of latent nationalism, identifying itself as Californian and not Mexican.

Indeed, while Texas wanted to be closer to the United States and held an almost jingoistic attitude towards Mexico, California wanted a cordial relationship with Mexico and was very desirous of remaining independent of the United States. In many ways, Texas and California were destined to be rivals, if not enemies. Over the horizon, however, emboldened by the purchase of Louisiana, the United States had started growing ever more desirous of expanding from sea to sea, seeing to extend the eagle's wings across the continent.

Within California, there was a problem from sheer demographics. The base of the republic rested on the Anglo-Californians. They had settled the coast and immediate interior, with the base of their population in the new capital of San Francisco, a sleepy little town of just 17,000 people. The Latinos lay mostly in the same area, mostly involved in ranching and small-scale mining operations outside of the cities and often corralled into what had been called barrios in the cities. And everywhere lived the Native Californians, often derisively called the "First Nations". They were mostly ignored by the government, although those farsighted enough to see future immigration feared for encroachment on their lands.

The future was full of great doubt for the young nation. But it also held great, great promise.


	2. 1836 - 1846

After the chaos of the Californian War of Rebellion had subsided, a proper election was held in order to arrange a government. The interim president of California, Amasa Stafford, was easily elected as the first official President of California, bringing the liberal Freedom Party to the head of Californian politics. In an act of political self-sacrifice, Stafford wrote it into the constitution that the President of California could only be elected for a single six-year term, barring himself from reelection. The Congress of California was arranged as well, with only four states being arranged, around the region of the Bay Area. San Francisco itself was created as a capital district in the same vein as Washington DC, but as a full state, managing to circumvent the troubles the American capital was already facing of no representation in the congress. The remainder of all the land in California was simply lumped into the Unorganized Territory, with a provision that states could be made from it.

With this in place, California had a very quiet beginning. Because of its geographic location, there was only a small inflow of immigrants, less than 500 in all of 1836. With population growth slow, California remained a small nation, with the lands around the Delta becoming rich farmland with a painfully slow progression of draining marshland. Windmills became a common sight in this region. In the interior, along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, ranching remained a dominant industry. In the mighty Sierra Nevada, a basic mining industry had started, extracting iron and copper.

With such a basic economy and population, California lived a quiet life for four years. In 1838, the first factory in the nation was built, a basic bakery owned by the Wilkerson family. Despite the modest output of the factory, and the meager profits it provided, the Wilkersons were soon called the "first industrial family" of California. Regardless of this small seed, California remained an agricultural nation for many years, lacking the manpower and wealth to start up a proper industrial economy.

Taking advantage of this, California tried to advertise itself as a cornucopia, a breadbasket where all sorts of agricultural products were produced. It had some effect, as from 1837 to 1841, 6,782 people moved to California, braving the harsh journey around Cape Horn to start anew in the small republic. Diplomatic feelers to Mexico soon managed to quell some of the harsh feelings brought on by the end of the Rebellion, sorting out a small border dispute over the border with Baja California. By the end of 1839, Mexico and California were back on speaking terms, and a trickle of Hispanic immigrants had begun. These new immigrants, however, were soon herded into the _barrios_ like any other.

Before long, though, problems arose. In 1840, Texas had been denied annexation by the United States once again, and the government was faced with growing unhappiness from the people of Texas. Trying to focus the people's ire outwards, the Texan government raised a complaint to the Californian government over the issue of slaves escaping across the border California and Texas shared on the Rio Grande, some 60 in the last 4 years. Texas demanded the return of these slaves, but President Stafford denied it, stating "California is, and always will be, a nation of free men." The Texan government was quick to threaten war, but at a critical moment, Mexico suddenly declared that it would defend California against any Texan aggression, more out of remaining anger against Texas than fondness for California.

In mid 1842, the second election in Californian history began. As he had promised, President Stafford did not stand for reelection, and the Freedom Party chose another prominent leader of the former Rebellion, Senator Albert Baxter. The opposition, the conservative Bear Flag Party, put up Representative Ronald Douglas, a prominent lawyer who had been elected in the Midterms of 1869. The campaign was largely as relaxed as the last 6 years had been, with both sides advocating policies that differed only in several smaller differences. Baxter, for example, advocated larger agricultural subsidies, while Douglas advocated smaller subsidies. Neither side paid too much attention to industry, which was growing at a snail's pace.

With the election in a dead heat, the Freedom Party managed to squeak out a victory, and Albert Baxter was elected the 2nd President of California. Baxter and Douglas had notably had running mates, which President Stafford had not, so California gained its first Vice President, in the form of Oswald Carpenter, the former Governor of the City-State of San Francisco. From 1842 onward, President Baxter elected to take a position of maintaining the status quo, enacting very little meaningful legislation. The "Quiet Years" continued onwards from there.

By 1844, though, a new problem arose. The independent California was starting to see a small trickle of immigration from the Orient, almost entirely from China. The "Chinks" were viewed derisively, as a blight on the country, and many of them were often quarantined into ethnic neighborhoods, like a worsened version of the _barrios_. This didn't stop them, and by 1845, there were 402 Chinese immigrants in California, mostly from southern China and almost none from the ruling Manchu elite. The Baxter administration chose to ignore the problem, leaving it to the decision of the local governments. Many adopted what became known as the "Celestial Laws", segregating the Chinese from mainstream Californian society.

In 1845, the newly elected President James K. Polk accepted Texas' annexation efforts, giving the United States a direct border with California. As expected, Texas was admitted as a slave state to the union, and its senators immediately began clamoring for the United States government to force California to return the 1,381 slaves that had escaped from the Republic of Texas to the California Republic. The Senate soon responded, and sent an ultimatum for California to return the slaves. Mexico still defiantly supported California, but the Californians feared that it wouldn't be enough. In desperation, they sent an envoy to the United Kingdom for help, portraying themselves as a weaker nation unjustly threatened by a larger aggressor, carefully emphasizing that the aggressor was the United States, with whom the United Kingdom still had a massive feud.

On the 18th of March, 1845, the United States declared war on California, and Mexico came to its aid. The jingoists in the US Congress felt this was an opportunity to annex California and gain access to the Pacific, while southern representatives felt it was a chance to annex more land from Mexico to make into future slave states. However, as Californian and Mexican troops began clashing with the United States at the Rio Grande, salvation came for California. The United Kingdom, under leadership of Prime Minister Robert Peel, declared its support for the California Republic, and declared war on the United States on the 25th of March. Subsequently, treaty talks over the situation in the Oregon Country completely fell apart and were ended immediately. War had begun, the first true war in California's history.


	3. 1846 - 1856

The United States soon had to face British invasion through Canada, and a good portion of its forces were diverted to fight in the north. As such, California and Mexico's forces were able to hold the line at the Rio Grande, bogging them down and preventing any meaningful effort to advance into either Mexico or California. The war dragged on for three years, and held at a grueling stalemate. Finally, facing louder and louder opposition from the Whig Party, which had managed to start forming a solid position of anti-expansionism, President Polk was forced to call for peace. All parties agreed to a _status quo ante bellum_ , but the effects were much larger than that. In the United States, their expansion had been stopped for the first time, and with both the Oregon Country and California denied the USA, they were blocked from a port on the Pacific. The British, meanwhile, saw a rise in nationalistic spirit in Canada. Canada had been scrounging for an identity that tried emerging in the Rebellions of 1839, but they now had a much stronger identity: that of not being American, and of being loyal British subjects, Anglo-Canadian and French Canadian alike.

In California, the experience brought Mexico and California together, and the two officially signed the Mexican-Californian Alliance in 1848, forming a bond described by the outgoing President Baxter as "that of a mother with her child." At the same time, California had started falling into the sphere of influence of the United Kingdom, who saw them as a strategic ally in the region, and soon opened a proper embassy in San Francisco. With the strength of the victory on their side, Vice President Carpenter was easily elected to becoming the 3rd President of California, securing the Presidency for the Freedom Party a third time.

In February 1849, the Californian economy began to properly explode with an event that determined its entire future. In the upper portion of the Sacramento River, a small mining company called the Matthewson Mining Co. trying a new method of dredging rivers uncovered gold. A very large amount of very pure gold. They attempted to keep this a secret, but the sudden influx of gold from the company raised questions, and word soon got out. The press quickly got hold of it, and all around the world, California was said to be host to the "Motherlode", and that any man could strike it rich if he struck out to California.

All at once, the world wanted to be in California. Steamer companies from all over the world, especially the United States, began to operate regular service to the California Republic, sending the immigration rates sky high. In 1848, there had been 1,032 immigrants to California. In 1849, there were 17,832. Men and women began flocking from all over the planet to strike it rich in California. The influx of immigrants allowed California to carve the state of Sierra Nevada out of the Unorganized Territory. Irish, German, French, Italian, British, all wanted to travel to California. However, of note was the fact that Chinese immigration increased rapidly as well. Many of the immigrants were transient, coming to California to prospect for gold and then returning to China. A number, however, remained in California, and were promptly subjected to the full brunt of the Celestial Laws.

The Rush of '49 was said to have made California what it was. From 1849 to 1852, the three main years of the rush, California managed to triple its population. San Francisco grew to a massive city of tents and shacks, swelling to nearly 78,000 people and securing itself firmly as the largest city in California. It soon became an evocative image that shacks of those seeking to strike it rich were crowded right up to the steps of the modest Capitol building. In fact, it was this event that prompted the government to remodel the Capitol into a proper building. Money surged into the nation, prompting a massive swell in investment and construction. Across the bay, the town of Redwood began to develop into the heart of industry for the whole country, with factories being built to provide tools for the miners. Farms spread like mad, as more food was needed for the miners. And of course, the mining industry surged to become a massive portion of the nation's economy. The economy went wild, making men into millionaires overnight. The San Francisco Stock Exchange had its start in the rush, organized to keep track of the stocks in companies catering to the gold rush.

As the craze of the rush died out going into 1853, California was a vastly changed nation. Not only had the nation become much more cosmopolitan, but San Francisco had developed into a proper city, with actual houses being built across the peninsula governed by the City-State. After so many people came on overland trails from the USA, interest in a railroad stretching from the USA to California surged, prompting President Lewis Cass of the USA to ask the Congress to organize a company to handle such a railroad, but he faced opposition from the southern Democrats who were fracturing his own party and stoking the secessionist flames in the south. The United Kingdom was now solidly interested in California, with many British companies investing into California, helping to fuel Californian industry. And perhaps less desirably, the Mormon Church had moved its location to the coasts of the Great Salt Lake deep in the interior, asking California for recognition, but butting heads over the issue of polygamy.

California had gained a new reputation as a dynamic nation. An immigrant to California during the rush, Leland Stanford Sr. soon organized the first railroad company in California with government support, the California Pacific Railroad. Within a month, ground had broken on constructing a railroad line from Redwood to the town of Sacramento, and plans were being drafted to extend the line into the United States, forming a "Transcontinental Railroad". The Hispanic population of California, which with immigration during the Rush of '49, had swelled to nearly 87,000 people, and they had begun campaigning for greater recognition within California. Under the leadership of men like Anacleto Hernandez, the campaign gained some traction from the fact that most Anglo-Californians considered Latino-Californian to be below the Anglos, but still above Chinese-Californians. While the movement fell short of its goal of full legal representation, one of its major achievements was the enshrinement of Spanish as an official language of California, alongside English.

In 1854, for the fourth time, the Freedom Party won the Presidency by coasting off its boasting about how it managed to use the Rush to bring California an unprecedented level of prosperity, with Vice President Hammond Hart becoming the 4th President of California. At this point, the Bear Flag Party was becoming despondent, having failed to capture the Presidency even once in the last 24 years. The government soon took a new approach to handling immigration, which had overloaded any facilities it had to handle immigration before the Rush, and acquisitioned Alcatraz Island as a place to build an immigration center. Alcatraz began processing immigrants in 1855.

Across the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, the influx of immigrants looking for open land began a new wave of migrations to the "Central Valley", prompting the reuse of former ranching land as farming land with the rise of new irrigation techniques branching out from rivers like the Sacramento, the Merced, and the Stanislaus. Converting the semiarid land to fertile farmland soon earned the San Joaquin River the nickname of the "New Nile", and the town of Stockton founded in the Delta gained the nickname of "Alexandria". California's agricultural production began to explode, driving a new wave of economic growth that helped carry the economy after the aftermath of the Rush.

California was now a prosperous and growing nation, but North America was not a happy place. In the United States, the divide between slave states and free states was growing starker and starker. Mexico was undergoing more and more political turmoil, while the United Kingdom was considering withdrawing from direct presence in North America entirely, threatening Californian security against the USA.


	4. 1856 - 1866

With population growth at an all-time high, immigrants of many stripes and talents were making names for themselves in California. One of the more notable figures was Leland Stanford, the chairman of the California Pacific Railroad and often called the first millionaire in California. Stanford had quickly inserted himself into the political world, funding campaigns for the Bear Flag Party during the midterms in 1857. In fact, Stanford himself had become what the Bear Flag Party badly needed: a popular face. Stanford not only built railroads all across California, he also used his wealth to create philanthropic projects all across California, most notably the San Francisco Public Library, generously covering most of the costs that would have needed to be footed by the government.

Stanford's popularity was actually sufficient that people began clamoring for him to run for the Presidency, despite him being born in the United States and not a native born citizen of California. Regardless of this, Stanford quite liked the idea, and he soon organized a campaign to enact the Twelfth Amendment to the California Constitution, which would allow naturalized citizens (such as Stanford) to be eligible for the Presidency. This gained a lot of traction in the Congress, since many of the new Senators and Representatives had come during the Rush. It barely squeaked by with a narrow majority in both houses, then got to the desk of President Hart, who refused to sign it initially, but a petition delivered to his desk with hundreds of signatures from all over California impelled him to sign the act, and it went to the states. At the time, California had grown from 4 states and a territory to 7 states and 3 territories. Through an excellent round of publicity, again heeled by Stanford, 5 states ratified it, and the Amendment became law. With this in place, Stanford immediately resigned from the board of the California Pacific Railroad in order to begin his campaign for the Presidency of California.

In the east, a problem had started arising from two groups. With more and more immigrants coming into California through Alcatraz, people had started moving further east into the frontier of California. With this, more and more people had begun moving into the land that the Mormons had claimed, but had gone unrecognized by the Californian government. More settlers, however, brought the problem to the forefront. People in San Francisco had begun talking more and more about what to do with the Mormons, who had ingrained themselves deeply into the Bonneville Valley. The main problem the Californians had with the Mormons was their practice of polygamy, which had been made illegal in California back in 1851. A similar problem existed with the Navajo, the largest native group in California. The tensions soon boiled over into a simmering guerilla war in 1858, with the Navajo attacking any settlers that moved into their lands, and constantly escaping into the desert before they could be caught.

The "Crisis in the East" soon became one of the driving issues in the political campaign of 1859-60. President Hart's Vice-President, Scott Kimberly, campaigned on a promise of crushing the enemies of the Navajo and the Mormons, and "taming" the east. Leland Stanford, however, criticized the Freedom Party for their inability to properly handle the conflict, with a war against the Navajo and a proper uprising by the Mormons imminent. He portrayed the Freedom Party as resting on their laurels, no longer capable of properly governing the nation in a time of crisis, and the Bear Flag Party as a reasonable force for moderation, to negotiate an amicable end to the crisis. This easily won him a lot of votes, and in 1860, Leland Stanford became the 5th President of California, and the first one not from the Freedom Party. It was an upset in Californian politics, and reestablished the Bear Flag Party as a legitimate force in California politics.

Beyond the Rio Grande, the United States had devolved into a full-scale civil war, with the southern states fighting to secede from the Union with British support. Many people had begun fearing that the Navajo and the Mormons would start a similar uprising. Stanford worked quickly to begin a new round of recruitment and military spending to strengthen the California military, and in 1861, traveled to Salt Lake City to negotiate with the Mormons. He presented his case clearly: abolish polygamy, or be crushed. It was that year that Brigham Young "conveniently" had a vision that they should discontinue the faith, and quickly came to a peace with the California government. Many splinter sects of Mormonism fled into the desert, continuing their practice. California would spend decades hunting them down to try and end the practice one and for all, but Salt Lake City was officially recognized by California, and enabled them to turn the Northeastern Territory into the state of Deseret.

The Navajo, by contrast, got much more generous concessions. President Stanford was convinced that by apportioning land to be exclusively for the natives, he could quell their unrest and still have most of the rest of California's land available for settlement. The Navajo quickly took the deal, and the Arizona Territory had the State of Navajo carved out of it, becoming analogous to the Indian Territory in the United States (which at the time was split between the CSA and the USA). In the space of 4 months, President Stanford had solved a crisis of two years that the Freedom Party could not solve, which cemented his political effectiveness as well as his popularity as President. Under his administration, the government took an approach of transitioning subsidies from farming to industry, not the least of which was Stanford's own California Pacific Railroad. California soon managed the construction of a railroad to Salt Lake City, connecting the interior like never before. However, one notable new direction the retooled Bear Flag Party took under President Stanford was the enactment of several "National Reserves", areas where development would be limited, in order to "preserve the natural heritage of California for the future", kicking off the start of conservationism in California.

The Bear Flag Party saw an era of moderate but significant growth in the Californian economy, with towns like Stockton and Redwood becoming centers of industry in California and producing manufactured goods such as canned goods, textiles, and furniture. The Napa Valley region soon became a very big region for grape production, and wines started getting produced in earnest. Fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats were abundant, and California didn't spend a single dime on importing food for the populace at-large. The cities were also growing rapidly, with San Francisco transitioning from a city of tents and shacks to a well-designed city with wide boulevards and green parks, courtesy of designs from the Stanford Administration. Rather than the uncontrolled growth of the Rush, the Stanford Presidency and the Bear Flag Party's first term in charge of the nation had produced an era of steady, meaningful growth, earning the President the nickname "Slow-and-Steady Stanford". He ended his Presidency in 1866 with the highest approval rating of any President in the history of California, with Senator Harold Bennett becoming the 6th President of California after him.


	5. 1866 - 1876

Under the Bear Flag Party, California had gone from a boom economy driven by the massive rush of people surging into the nation to having a proper economy driven by financial investment and the growth of national production. President Bennett inherited the legacy of President Stanford, who had returned to the California Pacific Railroad and was already working on establishing a new public university. However, Bennett was stepping into shoes far too large for his capacity. Stanford had actually done him a disservice: he had set the bar incredibly high, and when Bennett started underperforming, people began to write him off as another middle of the road President.

Perhaps out of frustration, Bennett started trying to improve his standing in 1867 by increasing subsidies to industries, to the point where companies had begun bidding on who would receive what subsidies. Seeing how easy Bennett could be manipulated, the industry quickly began lining the pockets of Bear Flag, pushing the party further towards the interests of big business. Abroad, California had fallen well within the sphere of influence of the United Kingdom, and had begun building the Great Coast Railroad, a railroad that would stretch all the way from Redwood to the city of New Westminster, the capital of the British dominion of Cascadia.

Bennett soon became lampooned as a weak, vacillating man, pulled by the puppeteers of big industry. People began crying for a return to the efficient, honest administration of Stanford, who had already made enough money in his life that he hadn't felt the need to derive massive amounts more from the Presidency. It was onto this stage that Robert Waterman, a senator serving his second term from the Freedom Party. Waterman was part of a splinter faction in the Freedom Party called the Progressives, who had started growing desirous of a clean, efficient administration, ironically enough emulating President Stanford as an example of this. In the midterm elections of 1869, Freedom had started to gather itself back up by gaining a majority in the Senate, but was split almost down the middle between the Traditionalists and the Progressives, deadlocking their efforts to work against Bear Flag and giving them the ability to keep pushing their agenda, which had become emphasizing profit of businesses at all costs. After all, they needed something to justify their close relationship with the magnates.

In 1870, California was approached by representatives from the Confederate States of America, which had won its independence with British support in 1863, for the construction of a railroad through to California, anticipating the United States asking to do the same. Indeed, just months later, California received an offer from the United States to build a railroad through California to the Pacific as well. There was a brief period of back and forth in the Congress, until Leland Stanford stepped in and offered to use the California Pacific's resources to help build both lines, with government support. At the same time, they would build a new railroad line along the coast to connect Redwood and San Francisco, the terminus of the northern line, with the burgeoning city of Los Angeles, the terminus of the southern line. This proved very popular, and the government gave the approval. The next week, ground broke to connect the existing line that went out to Salt Lake City with the line the United States was building across its great plains, as well as to extend a line connecting the small town of Phoenix in the Arizona Territory with the line the Confederates had extending to the town of El Paso in Texas.

By 1872, the Bear Flag Party was facing severe criticism for being deep in the pockets of big business, and President Bennett's population was severely lagging. Just months before the election, the Progressives in the Freedom Party had come to absorb the loyalty of most men in the Congress, and they pushed forward a measure to impeach President Bennett on charges of corruption. The measure succeeded near the start of the election, but the measure to thusly remove the President from office faced even greater opposition. After three votes, they failed to get the required majority, and the issue was dropped. Bennett, however, had become a lame duck, completely ineffective in politics. He quietly finished his term out of the spotlight, and Bear Flag lost the election to Freedom, who won a good majority with Robert Waterman running on their ticket to become the 7th President of California.

Almost immediately after taking office, President Waterman began struggling against the entrenched political machines in the National Government. Hailed by the people for his efforts, Waterman's struggles did not extend outside the Capital. All across the nation, from Redwood to San Diego to Salt Lake City, various political machines held vast sway across entire cities. While San Francisco itself was largely under control of the government, cities like Los Angeles were under the thumb of "Chief" Harrison, who held complete control over the city council and the mayor, turning the city into his own personal duchy. Similar situations existed in the north, where the city of Stockton was under the control of "Chief" Davidson, who ran the city as if it were a nation all on its own, with a privatized police force under Davidson's own control.

In 1875, a new rush for silver broke out in the Red Rock Territory, although it wasn't anywhere near as strong as the old Rush of '49. With a surge in population, California was able to incorporate the state of Plata, making a total of 9 states in California. Railroads were being built all over the nation, with smaller local railways complementing the larger California Pacific Railroad. Not only this, but education received a massive boost with the opening of the new University of California in the town of Berkeley, which quickly became the most prestigious university on the western coast of North America. Undaunted, former President Stanford used his wealth and affluence to open his own university, Leland Stanford University, in the town of Palo Alto. With these two top-flight universities, a new generation of scholars began to grow in California.


	6. 1876 - 1886

Seeing how popular the National Reserve system had been under the Bear Flag Party, President Robert Waterman sought to expand the system, expanding the system to cover vast swathes of the nation, from the northern redwood forests to the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada to the deserts of Deseret. After the expansion was complete, there was a total of 15 National Reserves, covering hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land. Of note was the Yosemite National Reserve, called the "Jewel in the Crown" of California. The reserve was made popular by the works of John Muir, an immigrant from Scotland who spent many years living in Yosemite Valley and producing photographs and poems that were published all over California, as well as in the world.

In 1877, President Waterman suddenly suffered a stroke, rendering the left side of his body paralysed. After the incident, Waterman spent the rest of his term in the Executive Mansion, often called the "Gold House" for its bright ochre paint as well as California's history with gold. During that time, there was a brief period of time when the First Lady of California, Jane Waterman, served as the intermediary of the President. It was well noted that the First Lady often determined which issues were more pressing for the President, and controlled which ones got to his desk. As the President would more often than not just sign the bills that got to him, many joked that Jane Waterman had become the "Interim President" of California.

Owing to the term limits of California, President Waterman was able to retire peacefully, and a closely contested saw Senator Adam Cumberland of Bear Flag elected the 8th President of California. Seeking to improve his popularity, President Cumberland sent envoys to Mexico to negotiate the purchase of the Baja California Peninsula. The Mexican president, Porfirio Diaz, was eager to keep good relations with California, as he had in his previous Presidency. The year before, however, Diaz had enacted a coup against the Mexican government, and had seized total control as President. His rule as a dictator brought criticism to President Cumberland, who was seen as negotiating with an oppressor. It especially brought the ire of the Hispanic Californian population, who lead demonstrations in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Phoenix against negotiating with Diaz. In many cases, the protestors were put down by the "Haldemans", a private security force often employed by men in the Bear Flag party. The Haldemans were also often used to put down strikes in factory towns such as Redwood, Stockton, and Concord.

Regardless of the protests, the treaty went through, and the Senate voted to approve the purchase of Baja California. The territory was soon formed into the Territory of Baja California. President Cumberland spoke proudly of the purchase in a speech in 1879, saying "After many years, Alta and Baja California are unified once again." With no real towns to speak of in the largely desert region, the government of California gave approval for the incorporation of a town not far from San Diego that was named "Mexicali", as a portmanteau of "Mexico" and "California". However, with all the controversy that had already come about, even more came when white settlers and immigrants began to pour into the territory, in some cases displacing the Mexicans who already lived there. After protests managed to bring construction on the town of Mexicali to a halt, President Cumberland was forced to negotiate a settlement of paternal ownership, in which those who already lived in Baja California would be granted the right to remain on their land and not get kicked out.

However, as more white settlers and immigrants came to California, the Mexicans who were already there were corralled away from the main Anglo cities into _barrios_ just like in cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco. In fact, as time wore on, the states of Mojave and Arizona as well as the territory of Baja California had begun to implement a series of legal segregations against Hispanic-Californians that were collectively called _Separación_ , from the Spanish word for separation. These laws were mostly entrenched in the southern regions of California, where the majority of Spanish immigrants and citizens lived. For the next few decades, these codes were the law of the land. Especially moreso after the California Supreme Court case _Estévez v Mojave_ ruled that the laws were legal so long as the _barrios_ received the same services that the remainder of the city received. For decades, the same phrase was repeated in the justification of _Separación_ : separate, but equal.

At the start of 1880, California had become a major agricultural nation, with towns such as Merced, Fresno, and Stanislaus growing up and down the San Joaquin Valley with the rise of improved irrigation techniques. In the case of these three cities, however, the drive came from the California Pacific Railroad's new Valley Line. Every so often, the company had started selling off plots of land that it owned around its tracks, and this drove the growth of towns. The same pattern was being repeated in the desert, with small mining towns growing up around railroad lines that connected them to civilization and allowed them to grow. One very odd town in the state of Mojave was the city of Salaam, a town that had become the only Muslim-majority town in California, seated right along the banks of the Rio Grande near the border with Mexico.

The election of 1884 was a fairly calm election, between Bear Flag candidate Andrew Folsom and Freedom candidate Silas Welch. Welch's campaign was centered around easing off relations with the Diaz regime in Mexico and moving towards friendly relations with the Confederate States of America and the United States of America, who had evolved from being bitter enemies to becoming neighbors who at least tolerated each other. Folsom advocated keeping relations friendly with Mexico, stating that their traditional friendship should be maintained. In the end, it came down to a matter of a few thousand votes in the state of Shasta, which threw their support for Welch and elected him to be the 9th President of California. His administration immediately began seeking friendly relations with both of the Americas, especially with the completion of the two Transcontinental Railroads. A Californian now had two options to travel east: they could board a train in Redwood and travel east through the mountains and the plains to arrive in New York City, or they could board a train in Los Angeles and travel east through the desert and the prairie to Savannah. The erection of telegraph cables across the country soon brought the nation closer together. Distances were shrinking fast across the world.

In December of 1885, however, President Welch was assassinated by a Hispanic man who felt that his administration was doing nothing to end _Separación_ , and Vice President Booker Minett was sworn in as the 10th President of California. Minett had not expected to be President, but quickly took action _against_ the Hispanic-Californians, seeking revenge for Welch's assassination. In many Hispanic neighborhoods across California, martial law was implemented until they could find the people responsible. This lasted for several months, and yielded no results, ultimately just reverting back to the previous status quo.


	7. 1886 - 1896

After the chaos of the aftermath of the assassination, California had returned to a status quo. In 1886, the Census Department announced with pride that California had surpassed 1 million residents, and that San Francisco was still the largest city with a population of 306,130. As it stood, 81% of the population was Anglo, another 11% was Hispanic, the next 6% were of Oriental descent, and the remaining 2% were everyone else, mostly Afro-Californians who had escaped slavery from Texas and later the CSA and Native Americans (almost all of whom lived in the State of Navajo). Among the 81% that were Anglos, most came from the United Kingdom, the United or Confederate States, France, the newly unified Germany, Scandinavia, Canada, Russia, or Austria-Hungary.

A new demographic had started growing in all of this. After the Boshin War, Japan had been unified, and ended its isolation from the world. As a consequence, the Japanese people had started traveling abroad, and some were moving to California. By the census of 1886, there were 3,613 people of Japanese descent living in California, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their presence was somewhat complicated, as the Celestial Laws were still heavily in effect, but the Japanese were neither Chinese nor Anglo. Some cities, like Redwood, created "Jap Laws" that had the same principle as the Celestial Laws, while right across the Bay in San Francisco the Japanese were largely corralled into a "Japantown" south of Market along Howell Street, or as it came to be known by the residents, "Hayao Tōri".

With a diverse population, California had evolved into a nation reminiscent of the United States in miniature. In fact, the California Republic had entered a close relationship with the United States after the northern railroad was completed. President Grover Cleveland of the USA wanted a close relationship with California, especially with the growing US economy desiring a greater amount of metals for its industry. Trade quickly began to bloom across the boundary with the USA, and Salt Lake City grew as the last stop going out of California for the trains. At the same time, the town of Las Cruces was also growing as a similar city for the line that connected California with the Confederate States. In the case of both the USA and CSA, they highly valued trade with California, as it meant that they both had access to the Pacific Ocean, with California as a proxy.

To the north, the Dominion of Cascadia had been independent for some time, serving as Britain's arm on the western coast of North America. However, the renewed colonial race in Africa had diverted their attention elsewhere. With this, California had fallen ever more into the sphere of influence of the United States. American culture had started to saturate California, with books and plays working their way all across California. California, however, had also started its own sort of culture, a blend of Anglo, Mexican, and Chinese cultures that served to define California as a "cultural melting pot". Californian culture especially came to prominence in the world when something new happened: an all-Chinese-Californian theater troupe called Huaxia managed to get a booking in 1889 at the Sierra Nevada Theater in San Francisco for a play entitled _The Ballad of Hua Mulan_ , and it was a monstrous hit. The troupe began to play across California, and later all of North America. With a Chinese fable suddenly becoming the next big thing in California, many began to question the treatment of the Chinese living in California.

By 1890, a remarkable new issue had come to pass. President Minett had filed himself as a candidate for President, which to some seemed like a violation of the law that Presidents could not be reelected. However, Minett posited that as he had come to the office after the death of President Welch, he hadn't been elected, therefore he would be standing for his first election, and continue serving as President. While the people were against Minett standing for a second term as President, the Supreme Court decided in _Wheeler v. Minett_ that President Minett could stand for his "first election". The people were outraged, and there was a surge of support for the Freedom Party. In fact, many people registered as Bear Flag voters cast their votes for Freedom, against the idea of a Presidency longer than 6 years. The resultant landslide brought the Freedom Party candidate Campbell Newton an easy victory, and he was sworn in as the 11th President of California.

Newton's Presidency was defined by a new legal struggle against the Celestial Laws. At the same time, a renewed push against _Separacíon_ had arisen. All of this was a fertile ground for the rise of a new element in Californian society: socialism. Long a fringe ideology, it had started gaining ground through three main avenues: the Chinese-Californians, the Hispanic-Californians, and an increasing number of discontented workers seeking to change the frustrating status quo. The growing "Progressive Movement", however, was an interesting sort of change. Unlike traditional socialism, the ideology in California had evolved to merge with other elements of classical liberalism, such as guaranteeing the right to vote for everyone regardless of gender or race, legal protection under the law for all citizens, and a market economy. The end result was a form of liberalism that was more focused on equality than freedom, an ideology sometimes referred to as "Social Liberalism".

With the rise of new Socialist elements in California, the Freedom Party found its support being worn away, as people found Freedom's persistence of maintaining the status quo irritating. More and more people had started flocking to the new socialist parties in California. However, these parties were smaller, regional groups that couldn't coordinate on a larger scale, owing to the fact that their support was still fairly small. In 1892, though, a traveling socialist demagogue named Lester F. Ward, who traveled all across North America, gave a series of speeches in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles, and even several of the smaller cities like Merced, Eureka, and Bakersfield. His speeches rallied many people to the cause of socialism, and catalysed the merging of the 7 largest socialist parties into a single party, the Progressive Party. Its sudden appearance in Californian politics was incredibly dramatic, and in the midterm elections of 1893, 14 Progressive Senators were elected, and 37 Representatives were elected. At the same time, several local towns elected Progressive mayors and other representatives in the various states and territories.

In the leadup to the campaign of 1896, the Progressive Party had been getting an increasing level of support, and their candidate, former mayor of Sacramento William Conagher. In a three-way race, the wave of support for the Progressives drained support from the Freedom Party, and soared to the front of the campaign. In a massive political upset, the Freedom Party received less than 20% of the vote, while the Progressive Party won with 45% of the vote. For the first time in world history, a socialist government had been peacefully elected to power, and William Conagher was sworn in as the 12th President of California.


	8. 1896 - 1906

The new social liberal administration in California started a series of reforms straightaway. Along with securing the Presidency, they had secured a majority of seats in the Congress, both the Senate and House of Representatives. Immediately after taking office, President Conagher signed into law the Education Reform Act, which created the California Department of Education, the first national-level education administration in California, to administer the public schools of the nation. At the same time, the Department of the Interior was created to manage the National Reserves, which were retooled into a much more comprehensive system of "National Parks". And perhaps the crowning achievement, as told by Conagher when reflecting on his Presidency, was achieving the implementation of a nationwide minimum wage, set at $1/hour. After much fighting, a new national system of safety standards was put into place, making several lethal jobs a bit safer. Other lesser reforms were also achieved. One that was somewhat culturally significant was making it illegal to hunt the California Grizzly Bear, whose numbers had been declining continuously ever since the Rush of '49. When the new protections were combined with the National Parks, the numbers slowly began to recover, and the species was saved from extinction.

The immigration terminal at Alcatraz had started to get overwhelmed due to the facility's age and size, so an overhaul was commissioned, modernizing the Alcatraz Immigration Center, bringing such amenities as electric lights and steam heating to the center. In San Francisco, the Capitol building and the Gold House were also renovated. However, with all the new spending, taxes were raised across the board in California, to the ire of many people. It soon became common rhetoric of the Bear Flag party, currently in opposition, to speak of the "oppressive" taxing and how it was subverting Californian democracy. Many former Freedom Party members, who were more conservative in ideology, left their party to join with Bear Flag, weakening them further and relegating them to the position of a third party. With this, the traditional left-right split in Californian politics was even further divided, with the separation being defined along the lines of socialism vs capitalism, unusual for a nation at the time. The Freedom Party came to realize by 1898 that they would never be able to elect a President again, and accepted their fate as a lesser party. The party that had controlled the Presidency for 24 straight years in the beginning of their nation's history would never control it again.

In 1900, California celebrated the new year with a big display of pageantry: parades, festivals, and the like. The economy was on an upswing as of late: oil had been discovered in Arizona and Mojave, and demand had spiked, especially out east. The Confederacy benefited, especially, as the railroad connecting Mojave and Arizona ran south through the CSA, making transportation even easier. In the cities, the growth of electricity production had enabled the construction of tram lines, especially in cities such as San Francisco, whose trolley lines had become one of the most identifiable parts of the city. The growth of oil as an industry had made California ever more rich, as were the Confederacy and the United States. The "upper-class" of California, despite complaining of "oppressive" taxes, were richer than ever. Some men were even claiming to be "billionaires", men who had total values of more than 1 billion Californian Dollars.

The turn of the century also saw a new surge of immigration to California. In 1901, the population of California crested 3 million people, with almost 1 million alone in the San Francisco Bay Area, the largest metropolitan area on the west coast of North America. And an increasing number of these people were Hispanic-Californian or Chinese-Californian. Among the Chinese-Californian community, many had been born in California rather than imigrating. In fact, it was estimated that based on the original groups who came during the earliest days of California's history, there had been four or five generations born as native citizens of California. It wasn't uncommon for the Chinese-Californians in the nation to have names like "Jane Wong" or "Adam Zhou". A renewed push had come for the end of the Celestial Laws, especially with the end of Conagher's presidency approaching. At the same time, the Hispanic-Californians also began pushing for executive action on _Separacíon_. Conagher, however, had chosen to focus on the plight of the working Anglo-Californian, which angered many of the supporters that had put the Progressive Party in office. Many of them voted for the Bear Flag Party, which was pushed into office with 52% of the vote. In an interesting twist, the Bear Flag Candidate was Leland Stanford II, the son of the former President Leland Stanford. With this victory, many people came to speak of the Stanfords as a "Political Dynasty" in California, much like the Davis family in the CSA or the Barnett family in the USA. As such, Leland Stanford II became the 13th President of California.

Stanford, rather than eliminate many of the reforms that the Progressives had put into place during their administration, instead chose to roll several of them back. Several departments were shrunk and spending curtailed, which of course involved cutting taxes, especially on the richest in California. Like his father before him, Stanford gave subsidies to many companies in California, which included subsidizing several new short line railroads. Prominent among them was the newly organized Yosemite Valley Railroad, a small outfit that was building a railroad from the city of Merced right up to the Yosemite Valley, to facilitate holiday travelers to the valley. Similar companies were built elsewhere in the National Parks, such as the Redwood Forest Railroad, headquartered in Eureka, and the Deseret and Navajo Railroad, which operated out of the town of Moab.

In 1905, a remarkable new project was started as a collaboration between the companies and resources of the United States, Confederate States, and California: a canal through Panama, which the CSA had recently purchased from Colombia. The project would shorten ship travel between the east and west coasts dramatically, and open California to large numbers of new immigrants. The project was pursued avidly by the Stanford administration, and Californian resources began to operate on the western side of the Canal, while the USA and CSA worked in the east. It would take nearly a decade and a half, but the canal would be a remarkable new exercise of the technological capabilities of the Edwardian Age. The Stanford administration also oversaw the expansion of automobile production, although they remained playthings of the rich. Electrical lights became common, and the oil industry grew more and more. As with the first Stanford administration, the second Stanford administration became synonymous with slow but steady progress. It was not, however, synonymous with social progress, and both the Celestial Laws and _Separacíon_ remained in place going into 1906.


	9. The Great Quake of 1906

The 18th of April, 1906, would go down in history as the worst disaster in the history of San Francisco, and all of California. At 5:12 AM, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the city, causing massive devastation. More than 40,000 people died in the city alone, not counting the people that were also killed in the Bay Area surrounding the city. The number is still unknown, but it's estimated that around 50,000 total people were killed in the catastrophe. While the earthquake itself leveled large portions of the city, including parts of the Capitol and the Gold House, the fire did far more damage, reducing large portions of the city from the Embarcadero to the Mission District to ash and rubble.

California was completely rattled, with its capital in complete chaos. President Stanford was later found with his family, alive, but his son had suffered a broken limb, his wife had a broken leg and he himself had a broken rib. Completely shaken by the experience, Stanford immediately set about bringing relief into the nation's capital, with extreme efficiency. Remarkably, Stanford reached across the aisle to the Socialists, practically pleading for support, which they delivered. Within a day, food and supplies were pouring into the capital. The nation rallied to the support of its capital, even from states like Shasta and Arizona and Deseret that routinely complained about the "bourgeois capital". Five days after the disaster, relief supplies started arriving from across North America as well. President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, President Furnifold Simmons of the Confederate States, President Porfirio Diaz of Mexico, and Prime Minister Maxwell Long of Cascadia all had trains of supplies commissioned within hours of hearing of the catastrophe, and all sent their good will to California in a display of international friendship that had been somewhat scarce during the first few years of the new century.

By mid 1906, the Californian Government had already shuffled the budget to make room for the reconstruction of San Francisco, along with help from the private industries. Several observers had been sent abroad to study the layouts of other capitals, most notably Paris. Most of San Francisco's streets had still been the narrow, crowded streets established by the tents and shacks during the Rush of '49. With most of the city in ruins, though, President Stanford soon unveiled a new plan to redesign the city with a new series of sweeping boulevards, large parks, and stylish new residences, the "Paris of the West", or less commonly, the "Baghdad by the Bay". The plan was well received, and construction quickly began working on the new layout of the city. Anchored where Market Street met the Embarcadero, the new streets radiated outwards to make transit easier. The streetcars were expanded into a new municipal service, operating from one side of the city to another. All along Market Street, the new commercial district was dominated by the new "skyscrapers" built by the biggest companies in the country. The tallest building in the country for some time had actually been the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, but its record was finally broken by the construction of the California Pacific Tower, the headquarters of the railroad of the same name. Rising 100 meters into the air, the new building became a symbol of the rebirth of San Francisco, and the growing prosperity of the nation.

Parks were also built in earnest all across the city. The largest was the new Golden Gate Park, established on the northernmost point of the peninsula. More than 5 square kilometers in size, its inspiration came from Central Park in New York City, and it was quickly built in the image of the redwood forests of California. Through an intricate new pumping system, the artificial Golden Gate River was made to flow through the park, providing the city with a waterfront. Redwood trees were also planted in the city, along with plant life that was dense enough to sustain elk in the new park. Throughout the city, new smaller parks were created, with the number rising from 100 before the Quake to nearly 900 during the reconstruction. Along the wide boulevards of the city, trees were planted everywhere, including along the medians of the roads. A count of trees planted found that 4.9 million had been planted everywhere in the city.

San Francisco was often jokingly called the "New Phoenix", in a slightly disparaging manner towards the actual city of Phoenix, for its rising from the ashes of the earthquake that had destroyed it.


	10. 1906 - 1916

The outpouring of support California had received from the nations of North America had started a new ideology: one of "North American Brotherhood". In the east, the United States and Confederate States had stopped seeing each other as enemies, and had started seeing each other more as brothers who had simply taken different routes in life. The Confederacy had slowly phased out slavery in the 1880s, improving its perception abroad. Under President Roosevelt in the USA, and President Simmons in the CSA, relations had normalized to the point that the two had opened formal embassies in each other's capitals. Even Cascadia and Canada had started growing closer to the two American nations than they were to the United Kingdom. In 1907, as one of his last major acts as President before the election, President Stanford signed the "Trans-America Pact" with the USA and CSA, which created a "bond of goodwill and brotherhood" between the three nations. While it was largely symbolic, the three nations did share quite a few interests. All three were determined to remain divorced from European affairs, all three were Anglo-American in heritage but increasingly diverse, and all three wanted to pursue closer relations with the others.

The election of 1908 was an odd one. While Stanford had given the Bear Flag Party a new lease on life with his management of the Quake of 1906, their candidate, former Senator Abel Carvell, was something of a buffoon. He seemed to forget many of the important issues of the day, and constantly used several malapropisms, such as referring to the California Grizzly as the "Mighty Beaver of the Sierras". By contrast, the Progressive candidate had finally captured the minds of the people who had voted Progressive to start with. The former Governor-Mayor of San Francisco during the Quake, Hiram Johnson had established himself as a man thoroughly committed to social issues. It was under his watch during the reconstruction of San Francisco that the Chinatown was desegregated from the rest of the city, and the _barrios_ were deprived of their legal existence. Quickly, Johnson received a massive base of support, attracting Progressive voters back to the banners of their party, and leading to a major victory in the election, bringing Johnson to be the 14th President of California.

In 1909, the first major challenge to the Celestial Laws came in the form of _Johnson v. California Republic_ , a court case brought before the Supreme Court that was essentially the President suing the nation he was in control of over a legal suit. And it had a great effect. Through a thorough investigation, it was shown that the "separate but equal" doctrine was in no way being applied, and therefore the segregation was unconstitutional. With this court case, two separate birds were killed with one stone: not only was the segregation of the Celestial Laws rendered null, but _Separacíon_ was also obliterated. This court case was quickly called one of the most landmark legal events in Californian history, if not the whole history of North America. The effect was immediate: President Johnson signed the Equal Protection Act, which afforded full rights to vote for every single citizen of California. And what was even more remarkable was the EPA itself: when it stressed every single citizen, it _meant_ every single citizen. When it was enacted in 1910, California became one of the few nations in the world to have officially given women the right to vote.

At home, the new protections were met with mixed reactions. Among the more progressive citizens, it was celebrated, with many stating that "California is now truly equal". However, there was also a darker side to this. The reactionary elements of California were quick to form lynch mobs that targeted the minorities of California: Chinese-Californians, Afro-Californians, and Hispanic-Californians. Under Johnson's administration, however, special squads were formed to round up these people, and bring them to justice. Regardless of these efforts, more than 700 men, women, and children were killed by vigilante justice from 1910 to 1930.

In 1912, California's economy was on the rise. The San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys were becoming the most prosperous agricultural region in all of North America, and possibly even the world. The railroad links to the east, when combined with the advent of refrigerated train cars, allowed large agricultural companies to ship their produce to the United States and the Confederate States, leading to massive influxes of money to the republic. The country had become known as "the world's cornucopia". It was also a shipping hub, with the city of San Francisco serving as the main port of entry for all of western North America. Under the Johnson Administration, the state subsidies to the economy were spurring a new wave of investment, growing industries such as steel production, shipbuilding, and lumber. Mining was also booming, with fresh veins of gold and silver being discovered in the interior, bringing new wealth to the state of Plata.

With California's economy prospering, along with that of the whole of North America, the outbreak of "The Great War" in Europe had almost no effect. Nations like the United States and the Confederacy also weren't too concerned, and they were far closer to Europe. California, being on the opposite side of a continent from the conflict that had begun burning Europe to cinders, was even further removed from the chaos. The most that was happening was sporadic outbreaks of violence between German immigrants and British and French immigrants. The election of 1914 was a quiet affair, with Vice-President Thomas Bartley running for and successful securing the Presidency for the Progressive Party against the Bear Flag Party nominee, Senator Ernest Malcolm. Bartley campaigned on a platform of "Peace in California", stating that the conflict in Europe was the problem of Europe alone. And indeed, that was the prevailing mood across most of North America. Only Cascadia and Canada were involved in the war, and that was by being part of the British Empire. Peace would continue to prevail across the continent until the following year.


	11. 1916 - 1926

Through to the end of 1916, North America had fully lived out its time divorced from the turmoil in Europe. However, in January 1917, a new event began to unfold. California by this time had become involved in an alliance with the United States and Confederate States, the "North American League" as they called it. And part of it was that all three nations would have to agree on going to war with any other nation before all three would join a war. The British were anxious to get the North American League to join the Entente forces and tilt the war in their favor, and had finally gotten what they needed. An intercepted telegram from the Empire of Germany to Mexico revealed that if the North American League ever went to war with Germany, that Germany would ask Mexico to attack on their behalf, and open a new front in North America. Mentioned in the telegram were terms including the reannexation of parts of Texas from the Confederacy, as well as all of California.

The continent was outraged. California was aghast that Germany was prepared to throw its independence away, the Confederacy was appalled that the Germans were proposing the loss of Texas, and the United States was angered over Germany proposing the parceling up of its allies. Washington D.C., Richmond, and San Francisco all began to call for war, but the Presidents of the three nations continued desiring peace. In particular, President Woodrow Wilson of the CSA was one of the strongest proponents of peace, but even the Confederate Congress was starting to become ever more desirous of war with Germany.

A month later, the February Revolution brought down the Russian Tzar, but Russia continued to fight. Even with this, it was clear that Russia wouldn't last much longer. Britain and France began to lobby even harder for the North American League to enter the war. In March, the German Empire's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare even began to extend to Union and Confederate shipping. On 18 March 1917, a German U-boat, most likely having traveled from German New Guinea, attacked the Californian vessel Sierra Nevada at the mouth to the Golden Gate, sinking it with 23 casualties. The alibi given by the German ambassador to California was that they had been targeting a Japanese ship, but the Californian government was still apoplectic. President Bartley later asked President Wilson of the CSA and President Champ Clark of the USA for the North American League to declare war. The Californian Congress approved it, followed by the Union, and finally the Confederate. With the process completed, the North American League resolved to go to war on the 19th of April 1917. Germany was doomed.

The United States and Confederate States were both able to send their troops to the front with ease, but California's armed forces were considerably more limited in their ability to engage. Regardless, 3,000 Californian soldiers traveled across the continent to depart from ports such as Charleston and New York to the front in France. The main participation, however, was with Californian production, with food being shipped across the continent and out to Europe to keep the nations of the Entente supplied. Of note among the 3,000 soldiers was the 15th San Francisco Company, a unit of 261 Chinese-Californian soldiers from all over the country. During the war, they fought with honor and distinction, and their unit received more Californian Medals of Honor per person than any other company that saw service during the war. Their service did much to raise the prestige of Chinese-Californians at that time.

With the involvement of the North American League, the war began to turn back in favor of the Entente. With North American forces charging at the Germans, along with new designs for tanks, and the collapse of the German government in 1918 forced the Allied Powers into submission. In the subsequent treaty agreements, Germany was left with all the blame of the war, and the great empires of Europe were ended. Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, all fell. Europe was in complete shambles. North America, however, was completely fine. In fact, the rush of wartime spending that the governments of North America had pumped into their economies had sent their industries sky-high. Lending had turned the nations of North America into the world's creditors. And the money they had for lending was sky-high.

Despite former President Wilson of the CSA advocating for the merging of the North American League into the newly formed "League of Nations" that was created after the end of the Great War, the Presidents of the NAL pledged themselves to remaining divorced from the issues of the world. As the sun dawned over 1920, the times had changed rapidly. The old Victorian-era cultures that had persisted until the war had died out in California, and a new, more liberal culture had risen to take its place. Women dressed more loosely, wore their hair shorter, and were more open with their relationships. At the same time, men had stopped growing mustaches and beards and stopped dueling and took up boxing. It was a new age of new social progress, and much progress came in California. In the election of 1920, the Progressive Party lost the Presidency to William Baudelaire of the Bear Flag Party. Of note was that Baudelaire was a Roman Catholic, the first Catholic man elected to the office of President. During his campaign, he declared that even though his spiritual loyalties lay with the Pope out in Rome, that his political and national loyalties lay with the California Republic, where "politics were divorced from matters of faith". In keeping with this, Baudelaire became the first non-Progressive President of California to be sworn in on a book of laws instead of a Bible. This practice had been initiated by William Conagher during his initiation, and only became an established tradition when Baudelaire included it in his own inauguration.

By 1922, a curious case of liberals and conservatives working together began to emerge: the rise of prohibitionist sentiments. The conservatives were against the sale and distribution of alcoholism on moral grounds, while the liberals (who were mainly socialist by this era) were against it on the grounds that it caused the working class a great deal of suffering. In late 1922, new legislation was introduced to ban the consumption of alcohol in the whole of California, similar to other movements that dominated states in the CSA and USA. However, the movement lacked any single, focused goal, and its movements were hampered by a lack of communication and coordination. The legislation languished and was eventually dismissed, only to be brought back in 1923, then again in 1925. The third time it was introduced, it succeeded in being passed, but only on the level of a governmental act, rather than amending its constitution like the USA or states in the CSA had. As such, it wasn't enforced as strongly. Particularly in the state of Sonoma, north of San Francisco, the legislation wasn't enforced at all, as the vineyards in the Napa Valley were a very important source of local revenue. Regardless of any legislation, the "Era of Good Feelings" continued on almost unabated in California, with the nations of North America experiencing a wild growth of their economies. However, many observers gave warnings, that often fell on deaf ears, that the mammoth growth wouldn't last forever.


	12. 1926 - 1936

In 1926, the election saw Vice President Eric Donaghy win the election against Progressive candidate Terrance Taylor to become the 16th President of California by a fairly wide margin, which was an indication that Californians were happy with the status quo, although several social issues were still endemic in their society. While the Johnson Presidency had seen the end of the Celestial Laws and _Separacíon_ , this hadn't lead to integration. In fact, in many places, the segregation had still kept going same as ever, even without legal justification. At the same time, even with minimum wage laws, the laws hadn't been updated in several decades, meaning that the minimum wage hadn't kept up with either inflation or economic growth.

In 1928, the bottom finally fell out of things. After massive overinvestment into the economy, the only thing that had kept the stock market going was continually pumping more money into it. When new money ran out, the stock market began to falter. And when it faltered, people panicked and started to pull their money out of the market. A fatal feedback loop started: when the stock markets dropped, people pulled their money out, which dropped prices further, which made more people pull out, and on and on it went. In one day, the 18th of March 1928, "Swan-Dive Sunday", billions of dollars were lost when the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, followed by the Richmond Exchange, then the San Francisco Exchange. All across North America, entire businesses were wiped out. Millionaires lost their fortunes overnight. And in the month that followed, California's economy was ruined.

The unemployment rate shot up to 10% in the months after that, and just kept climbing as more and more people were laid off from their jobs or were turned out after their companies went out of business. With the Great Depression, as it came to be known, continually getting worse, people began to turn their anger on the government. President Donaghy, however, was a firm believer that the Depression was a leftover effect of socialist policies, and took a "hands-off" approach. His philosophy was that the economy, if left to its own devices, would manage its own recovery. This turned out to be misguided, as by the election of 1932, the unemployment rate in California was approaching 25%. In that time, another new problem had arisen: out in the far east of the country, people had started flocking across the border from the Indian Territory and Texas in the CSA, and from Kansas and Colorado in the USA. These people, often called "Kansies" out of the misconception that they all came from Kansas, were flocking to the western states of California, piling all their possessions on their cars and driving until they got to the fertile western states of California, where many of them resettled in cities like Fresno, Merced, and Modesto, taking temporary jobs in agriculture. This often caught the ire of many native Californians, who felt that the Kansies were taking jobs that should have gone to local Californians.

In the election of 1932, President Donaghy gave a speech from the steps of the Capitol in San Francisco about staying strong in times of economic uncertainty, as a last ditch effort to keep the Bear Flag Party in power. However, it was undercut by the fact that right on the lawn of the Capitol, a massive shantytown had formed, and a very popular photo began to circulate in the papers of President Donaghy talking over the "Donaghytown" on the steps of the Capitol. It was yet another mishandling of the crisis that cost Bear Flag the Presidency and a large number of seats in the Congress. The Progressive Party was elected to the Presidency, with a remarkable new event taking place: their candidate was Felix Anzures, a Mexican-Californian man who had risen to prominence in the crisis through his promises of radical reform in the economy and a "Fair Deal" for everyone. It resonated with the people, and Anzures was elected in a landslide as the 17th President of California, as well as the first Hispanic President of California.

After taking office, President Anzures authorized the creation of the "Progress and Recovery Administration", which began a new set of investments into the economy, as well as making it harder for companies to lay off employees. Many criticized these actions for reducing the capacity of the economy to heal itself, but the effects were at least starting to slow down the effects of the Depression. The PRA began to organize several works projects to improve the economy of the country, as well as get people back to work. The flagship project of the PRA was the construction of the "Golden Gate Bridge", a suspension bridge across the Golden Gate that would improve car traffic in the region. Utilizing California steel, the bridge's towers began to rise high above the Bay Area, and quickly became seen as a symbol of progress and recovery. In the interior, a new bevy of dams and reservoirs were built, to both provide electricity and water to the dry interior of the nation. The growth of the movie industry in San Diego was also a source of comfort, with moviegoing a popular pastime during the Depression. Cartoons and movies flourished at this time, particularly in the new "Cherrywood" district of San Diego.

Abroad, the world of 1934 was a more tumultuous place. In North America, the seriousness of the economic situation was enough to get the Confederacy to seriously consider rejoining the United States, although these plans were eventually shelved. Tariffs had been raised across the whole of North America, although President Huey Long of the Confederacy and President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the Union had begun to lower tariffs to encourage economic cooperation between the nations. This had also come to extend to Cascadia and Canada, which were growing closer to the North American League in the face of declining interest from the United Kingdom. In 1935, both Canada and Cascadia joined the North American League, as did Mexico. Most of North America was now a part of the League, which had turned inwards to lick its wounds and recover. And by mid 1936, recovery had slowly started.

Outside of North America, however, things were taking a darker turn. In Europe, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy had brought these nations recovery, but persecution of minorities was becoming endemic, particularly in Germany, controlled by Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini of Italy had begun speaking of an "Italian Empire", and had invaded Ethiopia to conquer it. In Asia, the Empire of Japan had begun to invade more and more territory to create its "Greater Japanese Empire", and the subjugation and persecution of the people in its conquered territories had become infamous across all of the western world. Many began to speak of the "coming war", although many didn't know exactly what it meant. Some people talked of a war in Asia that might spread to North America, others talked about another European war that might require intervention by North America once again.

The future was uncertain.


	13. 1936 - 1939

On 14 October 1936, the 100th anniversary of California's independence from Mexico, things were slowly making progress on what some had called "the return to normalcy." While many even within the Progressive Party had initially criticized President Anzures' policies, the Fair Deal was slowly restoring California's economy bit by bit. The panic had ended, and people were slowly regaining confidence in the economy. Long gone were the rough-and-tumble days of the Old West that California had helped to give birth to, now California was as much subject to the whims of international economics as any other nation. The Golden Gate Bridge, a massive edifice of steel, had become a symbol of recovery for the nation. Interestingly, rather than simply painting the bridge a simple grey color, the bridge was painted a vibrant orange color to give it a more distinctive look, as well as increasing its visibility in the fog of the Bay Area.

Out east, the new irrigation projects managed by the PRA were slowly bringing life to new regions of the nation. Water diverted from the Rio Grande began to make the easternmost portions of Arizona and Navajo into productive farmland, making new jobs for the people of those states. Similar projects were carried out along the Colorado River and the Gila River, bringing a flush of new immigrants to those regions. The flood of Kansies from central North America only grew, leading many to complain that new agricultural jobs that were meant to go to Californians were instead going to migrant workers, thus leading to the national government passing a new law that mandated Californian employers to prioritize Californian citizens over migrant workers. This naturally lead to anger from the migrant community, but since they weren't Californian citizens, they had little to no protection under Californian law.

That same year, a very diverse team of Californian athletes went to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany. 34 men represented California in a variety of sports, among them 8 Chinese-Californians and 2 Japanese-Californians, along with 6 Mexican-Californians. While California had always been a middling performer at the Olympics, gaining silver and bronze medals, a moment of glory came when California won three gold medals, its first gold medals in its history. What was most interesting was the men who won them: the first gold medal was won by an Anglo-Californian man, Roger Waterman, grandson of the former President, in the pentathlon, when the German contestant was widely expected to have won. Days later, however, another gold medal came in track cycling from a Mexican-Californian man named Álvaro Murietta, who caused somewhat of a stir when he claimed his victory came from the blood of Joaquin Murietta, who he claimed to be a descendant of. The biggest media frenzy, however, came from a Chinese-Californian boxer named Eric Zhou, who managed to defeat Herbert Runge of Germany for the heavyweight boxing gold medal. While Hitler refused to meet with him, he became a hero back in California, even meeting with President Anzures to receive the Californian Medal of Honor. Waterman, Murietta, and Zhou later posed for a historic photograph that showed men of the three largest ethnic groups in California together in victory, a powerful symbol of integration in California.

In 1937, challenges began to arise from within the Progressive Party to the Fair Deal program. Several conservative Progressive senators had been elected the year before on a platform that included challenging the Fair Deal, on the ground that now that the economy was back on the road to recovery, the Fair Deal was no longer needed, and that the nation could scale back on parts of its spending. The liberal Progressives challenged back, stating that the Fair Deal would be necessary until the whole of the economy was back in shape. A coalition of conservative Progressives, concerned that the Fair Deal was damaging the impression of the Progressive Party nationwide, soon began to threaten a court case to take down key parts of the Fair Deal, most notably the Progress and Recovery Administration, which some said was unconstitutionally powerful for a government agency. However, even as they took it to court, three of the 7 judges on the Californian Supreme Court had been appointed by President Anzures during his term, and this inevitably lead to the Court declaring 5 - 2 that the PRA was constitutionally sound, allowing it to continue.

As the election of 1938 rolled around, the popularity of President Anzures lead some to question whether the limit of a single elected term of 6 years was truly necessary. Anzures, however, stated that he would respect the Constitution, and would not stand for reelection. This lead to a curious situation: two men ran for the nomination of a single party. In the case of the 1938 election, the Progressive Party saw two men attempt to secure the nomination to the Presidency: the conservative Progressives put up Senator Culbert Olson from Deseret, while the liberal Progressives nominated Governor Earl Warren of Mojave. When the party convention proved to be too contentious to properly nominate either man, President Anzures called for a referendum on the matter. In a public election, which many called the "Pre-Presidential", the Californian people voted to appoint Warren to the position. While the Bear Flag Party had criticized the Progressives for needing to have a public vote to decide who to vote for, the election gave Warren the publicity he needed to secure the election, and was sworn in as the 18th President of California. This would be the first "Primary Election" California had ever held.

At once, President Warren announced that the Fair Deal would continue, keeping up with Anzures' plans. The slogan for it was "Stay the Course", neither significantly increasing nor decreasing efforts going into the PRA. That year, the PRA's prestige was boosted by the completion of the "Three Great Projects", its three largest works projects. The first was the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge, a suspension bridge that gracefully stretched from San Francisco to the Marin Headlands, eliminating the need to take a ferry to the northern half of the bay from San Francisco. The second was the completion of the Stanford Dam, a massive hydroelectric dam on the Colorado River between Mojave and Arizona that both provided electricity for the southwest from a turbine designed by Nikola Tesla, as well as providing fresh water for irrigation. The third project was the completion of a massive new road, Route 1, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, making it possible to drive from one side of the nation to the other.

That same year, across the world, things were growing darker. Hitler's Germany had annexed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia. Imperial Japan had invaded more and more of China, and committed manifold atrocities in its attacks, most notably a massacre of the civilian population of Nanking, the horror of which was unlike anything ever seen before. While all of this unfolded, President Warren began to speak of California as an "Island of Stability", a region where the chaos of the rest of the world wouldn't reach them. This was a prevailing opinion in the rest of the North American League, which had continued to be ever more disinterested in European affairs, barring Cascadia and Canada, which were still British Dominions. However, as more and more of Nazi Germany's atrocities came to light, many in California's government began to push for the government to formally condemn the "Third Reich". President Warren refrained from this, although his government's new tariff policies did seem to heavily lean against goods from Germany.

In 1939, after 9 months of negotiations and treaties and agreements, peace ended in Europe for the second time in only 20 years. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and both Britain and France declared war on Germany. Europe was once again at war. And on the other side of the world, the California Republic stood largely ignorant of it all, declaring neutrality in the conflict. Even as they did, however, all diplomatic ties with the German Reich were severed, and the German ambassador to California was expelled from the country, leaving only the German Consulate as Germany's means of diplomatically interacting with California. The world was rapidly starting to tear itself apart once again.


	14. World War II (1939 - 1945)

Californian opinion was somewhat split before the outbreak of what had become called the "Second World War", retconning the Great War to be the "First World War". Before the war, many people had openly supported the fascists who held power in Germany, and a small but vocal fascist party known as "Calafia's Warriors" had gained enough traction to elect a single representative to the Congress in 1938. When the war broke out, however, public opinion began to sway heavily against fascism and Germany, to the point where even speaking German elicited suspicion. Opinion also heavily grew more and more anti-Japanese, with reprisals against Japanese citizens growing more and more common. Lynchings of Japanese-Californians grew more common as 1940 started. The government openly called for peace, but many in the administration began making plans for large-scale operations in the event of war.

In mid-1940, an emergency meeting of the North American League convened after the fall of France, which left Britain as the only force fighting against Nazi Germany in Europe. Prime Minister Alan Winchester of Cascadia and Prime Minister William King of Canada openly and loudly declared that the NAL should go to war against Germany, but President Garner of the CSA and President Roosevelt of the USA countered that a state of neutrality should be maintained. When Cascadia and Canada threatened to withdraw from the NAL over its inaction, a compromise was reached where the nations of North America would provide military aid and supplies to the United Kingdom while officially maintaining neutrality. This lifeline would prove to be an incredibly crucial aspect of keeping the United Kingdom alive and fighting, preventing Nazi domination of the continent. California's main contribution to the program of "Lend-Lease" was to provide supplies to Australia and New Zealand, which were engaged in campaigns against the Imperial Japanese Navy in the eastern Pacific.

Then, the hammer came down.

Prior to the 22nd of June, 1941, the Empire of Japan had invaded and captured the Hawaiian Islands from the British, which had alarmed many in the Californian Armed Forces, who alerted President Warren that the capture of the islands gave Japanese naval forces the range needed to strike at the Pacific coast of North America. Many brushed this off, since California wasn't at war with Japan. However, Japan had been growing angrier and angrier with the North American League as sanction after sanction came down on them, especially after all oil exports to Japan ended in the aftermath of the Nanking Massacre.

On 22 June 1941, the same day that Nazi Germany began an invasion of the USSR, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched an attack on California. Two naval detachments launched an aerial attack on the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the two largest cities in the nation and two of its largest ports. In the attack, the Gold House was directly struck by a bomb, and a stray bomb destroyed a portion of the main span of the Golden Gate Bridge, though it was kept from completely collapsing. In the attack, which was more of a move meant to inspire shock and terror rather than properly attack California, Vice President Goodwin Knight was killed, along with three members of the President's Cabinet, two Senators, and four Representatives.

The next day, President Warren delivered a speech on the steps of the damaged Gold House, giving what is considered by many to be the greatest speech in Californian history, which became known as the "Republic will Hold" address. In it, President Warren spoke firmly on the resolution of the California Republic in this time of crisis, and asked the Congress to issue a declaration of war. Two hours later, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly for war against the Empire of Japan. Rallying to the call, the North American League then convened and passed a resolution to go to war, bringing all of North America into war with the Empire of Japan. Three days later, Adolf Hitler declared war on the nations of North America. North America was at war.

In the opening days of California's involvement in the war, the War Department had only a few weeks to take stock of the situation of the situation of their military. The attack by the Japanese had heavily damaged civilian targets and industrial centers in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, as well as damaging military installations, but much of the hardware of war, that is, battleships, tanks, and planes, had been spared major damage, and most could be made ready after only a week or two of repair. Perhaps more critically, the oil refineries of Los Angeles, one of the most critical industries to fuel a war machine, were almost entirely untouched, and the actual oil fields that were further inland were completely out of the way of the attack. When the picture came together, the Japanese may have won the "battle" that was the 22nd Attack, but it was very much a pyrrhic victory. The whole of California's war machine had been dealt only minor damage. And this wasn't even counting the whole of the industrial base of North America, which stood behind California against the Japanese Empire. The War Department came to a single conclusion: Japan could be beaten with time and effort. The question was where to start.

As the main battleships and aircraft carriers were repaired and loaded for battle, Californian citizens began to flock to recruiting stations to volunteer for military service, swelling the military's ranks. Most notably, a large number of Japanese-Californian citizens volunteered, perhaps as a way of proving their loyalty to California in the face of their home country attacking them. Sadly, it wasn't enough to prove the loyalty of Japanese-Californians. Just months after the attack, the Homeland Safety and Security Act was passed into law, complimented by Executive Order 6033 from President Earl Warren. The declaration was simple, yet terrifying: Californians of Japanese descent were to be rounded up and removed from the coastal regions of California, with the justification being that if Japan invaded, they would collaborate with the Imperial Army and help bring down California. Naturally, a loud protest was raised by the Japanese-Californians, but the government remained resolute, and the deportations from the western states began as soon as August of 1941. However, the Japanese-Californian soldiers couldn't be deported, since every available man would be needed for the army. As such, the government decided to make one exception: any Japanese-Californian citizen who volunteered for service in the army would be exempt from internment. This only really applied to the men of the Japanese-Californians, however, and their women and children were taken to camps in Deseret and Arizona.

The first major operation of the war came in February of 1942, when a combined effort from the United Kingdom, USA, CSA, Californian, and Cascadian navies launched a massive operation against the Hawaiian Islands, to liberate them from Japanese occupation. The first wave failed dramatically, but through a massive push in the second wave, the island of Ni'ihau was seized, and through a campaign of "Island-Hopping", the Japanese forces were driven out of the islands bit by bit. The last of the Japanese forces, rather than surrender, committed ritual suicide. The scene was incredibly disturbing to the Allied forces, and it was a perfect indicator for the fight they were in for.

While American and Confederate forces fought alongside the British and Canadians in northern Africa in 1942, the Californians, who had become a sort of _de facto_ leader of operations in the Pacific, devised a strategy in collaboration with the USA and CSA to go "island-hopping", a strategy of taking back islands one by one across the Pacific in order to bring the Home Islands of Japan into range of aircraft bombings. Another part of the strategy took into account Japan's industrial capacity. They had made the Imperial Japanese Navy into a formidable fighting force, but ultimately, they didn't have the ability to replace what they lost. Japan's army and navy were overstretched with their attempt to invade virtually all of Asia, and if they could keep pushing back hard against them for a prolonged period, Japan would crumble from the inside. Just like in Europe, it was going to be a war of attrition, but on the high seas of the largest ocean in the world.

In May 1942, the Californian navy ambushed two Japanese aircraft carriers, the _Shōhō_ and the _Hōshō_ , not far from the island of Midway. After a fierce fight, while California lost the destroyer _Santa Cruz_ and sustained heavy damage to the battleship _President Stafford_ , both Japanese carriers were sunk, and the path lay open to continue driving at the western Pacific. Ships from the whole of the North American League participated in an almighty battle at the island of Midway in July of 1942, and resulted in a decisive victory for the Allied Forces. In one battle, five of Japan's biggest aircraft carriers were sunk, along with the loss of the battleship _Musashi_ , one of the two largest battleships in the entire Japanese fleet. At the same time, the Japanese lost thousands of their best soldiers and hundreds of aircraft, while the Allies lost just one smaller Union carrier and the Confederate heavy cruiser _Stonewall Jackson_. The Allied victory crippled the IJN, losing a large part of the Pacific from their effective control and opening the route to the home islands. Many considered the Battle of Midway to be the turning point of the whole Pacific War, and the day that Japan truly began to lose.

By mid 1943, Allied forces had pushed back through the Pacific as far west as the Solomon Islands, now working to relieve the threat of an invasion of Australia. As the allies in Europe prepared an invasion of France to open a second front to the war, the Japanese were in a constant state of retreat, fighting like mad to keep what they had before being forced to give it up and moving back to the next island. A daring effort from Californian and Union forces managed to achieve a small-scale bombing raid on the home islands of Japan, striking the industrial centers and naval bases in Tokyo and Osaka, but without causing enough damage to truly disrupt Japan's industrial capacity. The bombing raids were more achieved for propaganda, showing that the Japanese could be attacked where they lived. In 1943, a Japanese assault on Allied positions in Papua New Guinea failed miserably, further dampening the Japanese ability to fight back against the advancing Allied forces and ending any chance of invading Australia. A key part of the Allied ability to fight the Japanese effectively was the "Translation Committee" of the War Department, whose nominal job was to translate messages into Japanese to broadcast terms of surrender to Japanese commanders, but whose actual purpose lay with a group of men from Navajo who spoke the Navajo language fluently, and used it to create a code that the Japanese had no ability to translate. Many considered the "Navajo Code Talkers" to be among the men who saved the war.

On the home front, by 1943, California had gone into a state of "total war". Every aspect of the economy had gone from a peacetime consumer economy to using every available resource that wasn't necessary for the wider population as fuel for the war machine. With so many men on the frontlines, women had become the new largest source of labor for factories and businesses. The popular Union image of Rosie the Riveter had become a common symbol in North America to represent women working in factory jobs to supply the men at the front lines with everything they needed to win the war. And by 1943, victory had become more and more likely when compared with the seemingly impossible challenge of beating back the Empire of Japan back in 1941.

By 1944, the climax of the war was approaching. Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and the Confederate States had invaded Brittany and opened a second front in Europe. At the same time, the Japanese Empire was on the retreat on all fronts. Battles in the Mariana Islands, Guam, and Marcus Island had sent the IJN further and further back. As the first aerial raids began to burn Japan's homefront industry, a new question arose: the final stages of the Pacific War. This proved to be a major point of contention in the Election of 1944, where Progressive candidate Harold Godric called for an end to the conflict then and there, with Japan on the retreat and being hit with bombardments from above, while Bear Flag candidate Frank Merriam called for the full surrender of the Japanese Empire. While the election proved contentious, ultimately Merriam won the election, and became the 19th President of California. Merriam's government then announced to the Japanese government that there would be no negotiation, and the North American League would only accept an unconditional surrender.

It was at this time that in 1944, a breakthrough was made on what would prove to be the most influential device of the 20th century, superseding the car, the plane, the telephone, the radio, and the computer in its influence on the future history of the world. Across the North American League and in collaboration with the British Empire, the "Manhattan Project" had been working to create a device so powerful in its destruction that it could destroy an entire city in a single go. It was in 1944 that physicists at the University of Berkeley achieved the creation of a nuclear reactor, only the third to ever be made in the history of the world, at the same time that an enrichment procedure for uranium was perfected. Progress on the bomb was accelerating rapidly, even with the coordination between 7 nations.

In 1945, as the flag of the North American League was hoisted over the island of Iwo Jima and the Allied navies advanced on Okinawa, Nazi Germany surrendered. Europe was split in half: the east was occupied by the USSR, and the west was occupied by allied forces, with Germany in particular divided into zones of Soviet, French, British, and North American control. But Japan still persisted, with the government of the Empire split between asking for a conditional surrender and refusing surrender, even if it meant an invasion of the Home Islands. Bombing raids grew more common in the first half of 1945, softening up the Japanese defenses in preparation for the proposed "Operation Setting Sun", an invasion of the Home Islands. Wanting to avoid as many casualties as possible, the Manhattan Project sped up progress on the bomb, finally producing a working nuclear weapon that was detonated outside the town of Thoreau in Arizona, the first nuclear blast in human history. With the weapon proved to work properly, Operation Setting Sun was put on secondary priority, and the new plan to drop an atomic bomb on Japan under "Operation Candlelight" was brought to the forefront.

The final team selected to drop the bomb was composed of men selected from every nation taking part in the project. While California lost its bid to have the pilot be Californian, the NAL chose a Cascadian man to fly the plane. However, California did manage to have Michael Conagher selected as the man who would ultimately make the final preparations for the weapon to be dropped. Operation Candlelight went into motion on the 13th of August, 1945. A single Confederate bomber, the _Mississippi Queen_ , took off from the Allied-held island of Okinawa, flying north to the Home Islands. While whatever air forces the Japanese had left were tied up in attempting to defend against the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the _Mississippi Queen_ was able to fly into Japanese airspace undisturbed. At 9:47 AM, history changed forever. While flying over the city of Nagasaki, the bomb was dropped. The bomb fell for 46 seconds before exploding in the largest man-made explosion in history. In less than 5 seconds, more than 70% of the city was destroyed, and more than 50,000 people were killed either instantly by the blast itself, or by the shockwave. The resultant firestorm immolated many more, and tens of thousands more were injured. When looking back at the cloud, Conagher, knowing he'd made the bomb ready to go, uttered a single sentence that went down in history.

"My God. What have I done?"

Three days later, another bomb was dropped on Kokura, killing another 70,000. Two days after that, a third bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing yet another 85,000 people. The very next day, the Japanese Government agreed to a total, unconditional surrender. After 6 years of slaughter, the greatest, most destructive conflict in the history of the human race was over.


	15. 1945 - 1956

The world was in ruins. At least, Europe and Asia were. North America had escaped from the destruction of the war, and now, the North American League stood as one of the largest power blocs in the world, having completely replaced all of Europe aside from perhaps the British Empire, but even then its power was waning. Opposite the NAL was the Soviet Union, which now occupied half of Europe. With the nations of the world at the negotiating table, the failure of the League of Nations was addressed at once. The League was abolished, and replaced by the Global Union of Nations (GUN). It would be presided over by a Security Council manned by 5 representatives: one from the United Kingdom, France, the USSR, China, and a representative from the whole of North America. The NAL underwent changes as well. In the chaos of the post-war era, the Presidents and Prime Ministers of North America convened in the Denver Summit of 1946. Their meeting saw the reorganization of the North American League into the North American Union, which created a forum for the closer cooperation of the nations of North America against the chaos of the world.

Very quickly, in all its occupied territories, the USSR set up communist puppet regimes, creating the "Minsk Pact" and establishing a strong Communist power bloc that now stretched over a large part of the world, and threatened to continue expanding its reach across the world. The United States and Confederate States had immediately begun to work together to oppose the spread of communism by 1948 with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to oppose the Minsk Pact, but California's attention had turned inwards. A new movement had risen out of anger over the internment of the Japanese, where Anglo-Californians, Japanese-Californians, and Hispanic-Californians alike had grown outraged over the government effectively running its own concentration camps for the Japanese citizens of California during the war. While some argued that it had been a necessary move required by the state of war, others argued back that it was an unconstitutional infringement of the basic rights of Californian citizens. This public outrage lead California to sign the GUN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the pledge that such a travesty would never happen again.

But it wasn't enough. The new movement kept driving forward right into the election of 1950, where the new issue of civil rights had grown to become a major new issue on the national stage. Japanese-Californians, Mexican-Californians, and Native Californians had begun to organize themselves into new organizations such as the First Nations for Social Progress, the Japanese-Californian League, and others to protest for a guarantee of their rights as citizens of California. However, their initial poor organization crippled their ability to properly affect the debates, and Bear Flag candidate Herbert Flanders was elected as the 20th President of California on a platform of "peace and prosperity", through normalizing California's society and fully stepping back from the war. This proved to be short-lived, however, as just months later, the GUN declared an intervention into Korea to push back an invasion by a Soviet-backed government in the north against the NAU-backed south. California's ports would prove to be vital in the conflict, and as such, the nation was dragged off to war once again. President Flanders would prove to be a much more vacillating man when it came to war, being forced by successive motions of the NAU to commit more and more troops to the conflict. Even though the war was moving in favor of the GUN-backed southern government, the people of California had grown tired of war after war, and began demanding an end to California's involvement in the conflict. This came in 1953, when the final forces of the now-former Democratic People's Republic of Korea crumpled after a political crisis in Moscow resulted in their withdrawing support from the communists in Korea, as well as Chinese forces being tied up in continuing to try and beat down the remaining Republican forces, who were stubbornly holding onto the southern regions of the country.

Once the war was over, President Flanders showed to be a stronger leader than the first half of his term had indicated, negotiating a reworking of the NAU's charter in relation to California that allowed California to opt out of any military conflicts the NAU would vote on, but would still allow the NAU use of Californian military infrastructure all the same. With this, the NAU could still make use of the ports in Redwood and Los Angeles to reach East Asia, while California now had the choice to go to war once again. This came as more nations in Central America and the Caribbean were joining the NAU, adding ever more voices to the Union, and as such, many more wants, needs, and desires to the way the NAU worked. As the USA and CSA lead the way on the NAU's operations, California quietly began to distance itself from its core.

In 1955, one thing was readily apparent: California was growing, and growing fast. The nation's population had grown to more than 13 million, and showed no signs of stopping. This was putting a strain on the nation's infrastructure, most of which had been built by the PRA during the Great Depression back in the 1930s, when the population was just over 7 million. Clearly, the nation's infrastructure was entirely deficient, and serious change was needed. This was started under President Flanders with the creation of the Southern California National Water District, designed to begin moving water around to account for changes in population since the system was last updated in the 1930s. A large amount of this water was being diverted to Los Angeles, which had been growing increasingly rapidly in the last decade. The road system also needed updating as well, along with a proper way of moving water around the state to get it where it needed to be.

Into this political climate stepped Leland Stanford III, commonly called Amasa Stanford. He'd been making a name for himself as a Senator for San Francisco for the Progressive Party, having broken tradition of associating with the Bear Flag Party. Capitalizing on the need for reforming the infrastructure of the nation, Stanford began his own campaign for the Presidency under the slogan "Building the Future". Also added to his campaign were pledges for educational and political reform, which he included into a comprehensive restructuring of the way California worked as a nation. The way he campaigned for it was somewhat uninspiring (many jokingly called him "Professor Stanford"), but through the use of the growing medium of television, Stanford managed to get his point across, and everyone was buzzing about how Stanford was going to "fix" California. One of the most shocking moves he made, however, was selecting Miriam Davis, a senator from Arizona and a woman, as his vice presidential choice. Initial backlash from the more conservative members of the Progressive Party was quelled when a sudden outpouring of support came from the women of California, securing their vote in the election and propelling Leland Stanford III to be the 21st President of California, ushering in a new era of reform.


	16. 1956 - 1966

In his inaugural speech, President Stanford laid out a condensed version of his campaign platform as his ultimate goal for his 6 years as President, what he labeled the "Master Plan for Reform". The basic goal included the creation of a national education system with three tiers: improved elementary, middle, and high schools, coupled with the creation of many new "community colleges" to act as an intermediary step between high school and a proper college, along with the amalgamation of several smaller universities into the new University of California system, intended to make a top-flight system of public research universities to rival anything in the USA, CSA, or Europe.

Along with the Education Plan, a more controversial plan was proposed to create a national healthcare system along the lines of what many European nations had adopted. Known formally as the California National Healthcare and Medical Program, it soon was given the more popular name of "MediCal". To top all of that off, the third Stanford president wanted to take together the railroad systems of California and nationalize a large majority of them into a single state-subsidized company, while at the same time going on a massive overhaul of the road system, to create "highways" and "freeways" that would allow people to drive from city to city. The final touch was creating a new system of aqueducts that would help to move water around in the nation, allowing more growth in cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix.

All of this would require a substantial increase in taxes to cover the costs of all of it. Naturally, the Bear Flag Party fought it tooth and nail. When President Stanford proposed that the issue go to a public plebiscite, the public proved to be split on the issue, with more than 20% of people unsure of how to vote on the issue. However, a surprising new support came from the Gold House: In May of 1957, Vice President Davis gave a series of speeches in support of the plan, which she put under the banner of "the New Socialism". Her fierce spirit and uncompromising position lead many to give the vice president the nickname of the "Iron Lady", an epithet that would follow her through her life. Her spirited oration in support of President Stanford's policies managed to sway enough votes to get all 4 measures passed when the plebiscite came. By now, California had created enough plebiscites to have created a system for their operation, which was enshrined as the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution to create the process of the Referendums, allowing for the public to vote directly on issues.

With the massive new systems in place. California began marching forward. In 1958, after a heavy round of negotiations with the USA and CSA, both nations were given permission to test nuclear weapons in the Sonoran Desert in exchange for a lease, easing a bit of the stress of the new taxes on the economy. This came after the North American Union had voted to intervene in an ongoing war in Vietnam back in 1957, backed by support from the reunified Korea and a rebuilt Japan. Exercising its opt-out option, California refrained from joining in the intervention, but the Port of San Francisco and the Port of Los Angeles became common points of departure for soldiers heading to southeast Asia. Many in both of the major political parties were somewhat displeased with these arrangements, since California was generally opposed to American integration in many matters.

After the disorganization of the various civil rights movements initially, by the mid-term elections of 1959, they had reorganized into a much more powerful force to be reckoned with, and had come under the umbrella of "Californians for Change". Various movements, driven by Chinese-Californians, Japanese-Californians, and Hispanic-Californians, had spread their influence far and wide, and even had the backing of various Senators and Assemblymen standing for election and reelection. After the election results came in, enough Senators and Assemblymen had come together to formally call for a "Civil Rights Bill" that would formally enshrine legal protection for minorities in California at a national level. The loudest opposition to this, however, came from a much more worrying source.

In the CSA, opposition to the manumission and eventual citizenship of Afro-Confederates had lead to the rise of the "Kuklos Klan", a white supremacist and nationalist organization that had deeply rooted itself into the politics of the CSA and perpetually blocked any efforts to try and bring legal equality in the CSA. A similar organization, the "Sons of the Revolution", had risen in the United States to oppose equality for various minority groups, mainly immigrants from the "wrong" parts of Europe and Catholics. California had bore witness to the rise of the "Kalifornia Klan", which had clearly taken inspiration from the KK in the CSA. Its violent opposition to "Japs, Browns, Chinks, and Socialists" had made it a household name in California, but President Stanford insisted on trying to find a peaceful resolution to the pressing issue of civil rights in the nation.

Finally, on 16 April 1960, it came to a head. In a massive attack, members of the Klan detonated a car bomb on the steps of the Capitol in San Francisco, killing many civilians and civil servants but only managing to injure several Senators and Assemblymen. At the same time, a group of men assassinated President Stanford at the Embarcadero, but failed to kill Vice President Davis. Several other states saw attempts on the lives of their governors and their legislatures, with various levels of success. After the attack, while the government declared California to be in a state of emergency, Miriam Davis was sworn in as the 22nd President of California, becoming the first ever female President of California, and catapulting her to a position many never thought she would achieve.

The very next day, the newly appointed President Miriam Davis appeared to the public on live television, galvanizing a shaken nation with another one of her characteristic strong-willed speeches. In the course of it, she stated firmly "I do not negotiate with terrorists." She condemned the Klan as a terrorist organization, and issued a warrant for the arrest of anyone related to the Klan. That same day, she lived up to her name as "the Iron Lady" when members of the Californian Armed Forces began an internal operation to round up the Klan, arresting anyone known to associate with the Klan or have any suspicious relationship with it. Where once men proudly declared their affiliation with the Klan, now it was driven underground as its members were arrested left and right. Public outrage lead to an outpouring of support for the Civil Rights Bill, which was passed two weeks later.

President Davis' policies galvanized the nation, leading to renewed interest in the continuing projects from Stanford's administration that the Davis Administration was now dedicated to continuing. At the graduation of the first class from the University of California Berkeley, President Davis delivered an address that declared the graduates the future of California, and that they would do great things for their nation, which in 1961 was now 125 years old.

In a surprise move, President Davis used the precedent set by President Booker Minett to declare her intention to run for election to her own term, something that no one had attempted since Minett's Presidency. However, unlike Minett, her force of nature personality and her ability to captivate crowds with her speeches caught the nation's adoration, and her campaign slogan of "Stay the Course" helped secure her position. In the election of 1962, President Davis became the first former Vice President elected to their own term. It was a monumental occasion in politics, and President Davis declared that she had a mandate to continue the policies. Later that year, MediCal and CalRail officially went into operation after many delays and issues. On 1 January 1963, Highway 1 was opened, running from San Francisco across the new Bay Bridge through Oakland and all the way through Salt Lake City in Deseret, formally opening the California Highway Network.

At the start of 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated with the backing of the Chinese and the Soviets in the north and the NAU and other nations in the south, California chose to remain willingly divorced from it all. As agricultural production grew beyond what the nation needed, it began to export it more and more. Industrial centers in Stockton, Redwood, and Los Angeles began to produce more manufactured products, and before long, California was running on a strong export-based economy based around three main parts: agricultural products, oil, and manufactured goods. The Davis Presidency was overseeing the largest period of economic growth since the 1920s, and her approval rating was soaring because of it. Life was good in California.


	17. 1966 - 1976

Even as the Davis Presidency, what some loosely called a "Golden Age" of California, continued to oversee prosperity and peace in California, there were storm clouds on the horizon. Across California, a new countercultural movement had started to come into being as reform acts such as MediCal showed that California was moving in a much different direction when compared to most of North America. The CSA was still dragging its heels on giving basic civil rights to its Afro-Confederate population, while the USA was still torn up on the issue of its immigration. Canada was being torn in two with Quebec calling for its independence, and civil unrest in Mexico and the Caribbean was causing a lot of worry for the northern members of the NAU. Compared to all of this, the Davis Presidency had managed to tackle most of the issues and bring civil peace to California. However, even though California was at peace, the newest issue to confront President Davis was the issue of California's involvement in the Vietnam War.

In 1967, a massive demonstration took place at the Port of Redwood and the Port of Los Angeles, where people chanting "No more War!" and "World Peace!" barricaded the entrance to the ships that soldiers from the rest of North America were leaving through. Unlike in the USA and CSA, since California was not militarily involved in the Vietnam War, the media was far less sympathetic to the conflict, even as it was branded a crusade against communism, and the people of California agreed with this. A poll shortly before the protest showed that just 27% of Californians supported fully joining the conflict. And now, the protest showed California was even less sympathetic to the conflict than previously thought: the citizens didn't want _anything_ to do with the quagmire the war had become, including letting NAU soldiers depart from Californian ports.

The protests continued for three days, during which no soldiers were able to leave at all. The NAU naturally raised a protest to President Davis, but she fired back, stating "The Californian people are speaking their mind, and I am not one to silence them." She coupled this with a condemnation of the way other nations of the NAU were quashing protests in their own nations. The tensions go to the point where President Johnson of the CSA even suggested expelling California from the NAU, but this was avoided and a new round of talks began. Ultimately, California wanted nothing to do with the conflict in Vietnam, but the only other port that the NAU could properly use to send forces to Vietnam from was Tacoma in Cascadia, but it was further from Vietnam than the Californian ports and not as well developed. This one fact was President Davis' main weapon in the new round of negotiations with the NAU, which eventually came to a new accord that resolved for the Union to lessen California's financial obligations to the NAU in exchange for the continued use of its ports. This accomplished, many of the protesters dispersed, but the unrest continued, albeit in a diminished sense.

President Davis had come to be considered one of California's most successful Presidents, finishing her term of office on a high note in 1968 as the longest-serving President in California's history. The Progressive Party's hold in California was solidly assured in the Senate and National Assembly, however, Vice President Wilson Gerard lacked the charisma of his predecessor, and only barely managed to win the election against his opponent, Governor Richard Nixon to become the 23rd President of California. At the start of 1969, however, his chance to shine came. A combined effort from the CSA and USA had seen the success of an effort to land a man on the moon with the "Selene Program", setting a massive new crowning achievement for humanity, and leading to a "space craze" worldwide. It seemed like everywhere, people were chatting about traveling to Mars, setting up colonies on the moon, even space-based warfare. It got to the point where in 1970, President Gerard announced the creation of the California Aeronautics and Space Administration, commonly abbreviated to "CASA". A launch site was chosen just outside La Paz in Baja California, and research and construction began at once. The nation would launch its first satellite, "Calafia 1", in 1971, bringing California into the space age.

By 1972, the conflict in Vietnam was approaching a climax. Unlike the conflict in Korea, which had ended with a victory for the capitalist south, the Vietnam War was proving to be a much harder conflict to manage, though the constant guerilla tactics of the Vietcong. Draft dodgers had been fleeing to the neutral California, where the NAU was raising protests again. President Gerard was much less iron-willed than Davis, however, and folded on the issue, allowing the extradition of draft-dodgers from California back to the USA and CSA. This time, though, Cascadia and Mexico also protested this, revealing deeper issues in the NAU. folding on the issue of the draft-dodgers hurt Gerard's approval rating considerably, which opened the door for more men of the Bear Flag Party to be elected to the Congress, and reinvigorating Governor Nixon's prospects for a second run at the Presidency.

The 1973 runup to the Presidential Election saw many, many criticisms of President Gerard, even from former President Davis, who once quoted about him "He's dropped the torch." With his approval ratings plummeting, Gerard began attempting to save the chances of the Progressive Party for reelection. One such move was the Marijuana Act of 1973, which dealt specifically with marijuana use, production, and sale. For a long time, use of marijuana as a controlled substance had been illegal, since the Marihuana Act of 1928 (which was spelled that way intentionally), but the rise of the counterculture had seen marijuana, or "weed" as it was popularly known, become more and more widespread across California, mainly in the westernmost states. The Marijuana Act of 1973, rather than legalizing it, simply said that it wasn't "illegal", and that the National Government wouldn't arrest people for it. The states themselves could decide on the issue, but the government would stay out of it entirely. This won him some popularity, but it wasn't enough to keep the Progressive Party from losing the election in 1974, and seeing the election of Richard M. Nixon as the 24th President of California by a wide margin.

Nixon's campaign had run the slogan of "California for Californians". Increasingly, California had become more "Ameroskeptic", a term coined to describe criticism of the North American Union and its role in California. Nixon capitalized on this to bring the Bear Flag Party into power in California, and beginning a new national debate on the position of California in the NAU. A commission created to report on the nation's relationship with the NAU came to three conclusions: California had the most distant relationship with the NAU of any member nation, California's benefit from the NAU was more based in economics and trade rather than politics or military, and that as a whole, California was largely overshadowed by the USA and CSA in the politics of the NAU. Anger and mistrust of the NAU was growing across the whole of North America, however, especially as the Vietnam War continued to drag on into 1975 without any apparent success.

Rather than unilaterally declare that California was going to leave the NAU, however, Nixon decided to take advantage of the Referendum system to put it to a public vote on whether or not California should continue as a member of the NAU. A new campaign began as the debate began to lead towards the referendum, which was scheduled for mid-1976. As the campaign continued, however, something new came to light.

In May of 1975, a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle brought to light a rather sudden revelation: during the elections of 1972 and 1974, members of the Bear Flag Party in both the Senate and the National Assembly had been skimming money out of the budget for MediCal, CalRail, CASA, and the UC system and funneling it into campaigns for Bear Flag Party candidates for state and national seats. Public outrage was immediate and swift. The states of Mojave, Shasta, Sonoma, Deseret, and Arizona had to initiate recall elections to replace their governors once the full brunt of the scandal came to light. Both houses of Congress voted to remove implicated Senators and Assemblymen from office.

However, implicated members of the President's cabinet had yet to be removed by August 1975, and some people began to grow frustrated with Nixon's handling of the situation. By September 1975, some people had begun to accuse President Nixon of obstructing justice, which he justified away by stating that fully incriminating evidence had yet to be produced. And in October of 1975, the full scope of the scandal finally came to light: Nixon himself had been aware of the corruption, but hadn't done anything to stop it. At once, the Congress began an investigation, but by December 1975, all evidence brought against the President showed that while he hadn't directly benefited from any of the graft, the President _had_ been shielding the information from coming to light. This was enough for the National Assembly to vote for impeachment on 12 December 1975, and for the Senate to formally bring charges against him for the obstruction of justice and abuse of power on 22 December.

As the year 1976 dawned, California's politics were in complete disarray once again. With the referendum on continued membership in the NAU fast approaching, President Nixon had declared that he would fight the charges against him, even with the Congress virtually united against the President. Recall elections were in full force across the nation for members of Congress, state governors, state legislators, and even mayors of cities. As the NAU began to crumble from the inside out over continued aggravation over the issue of Vietnam, which was still dragging on, California was struggling to keep its head above water.


	18. 1976 - 1986

6 months from the scheduled referendum, the trial of President Nixon formally began. No president of California. Such an event had only come close to happening in 1872 with the attempt to impeach President Bennett that had failed. However, this was the first time that an impeachment had been successfully carried out in the 140 years California had existed as a nation. With the nation going through the greatest period of political upheaval of the whole 20th century, the Congress passed an emergency measure to postpone the Membership Referendum until November of 1976. With this, the impeachment trial properly began.

Nixon had announced that he would fight the charges as soon as impeachment was confirmed, but as the trial wore on, this proved to be largely a political move to appear as a strong President. Over the succeeding months, Nixon's testimonies seemed to fall flat in various places, and an attempt at making a bold proclamation of his virtue came off as somewhat uninspiring. He also seemed to be ageing rapidly, as a tabloid broke the news in May that he had been purchasing large quantities of hair dye to hide the fact that his hair was greying rapidly.

Ultimately, the Senate came to a decision in July 1976: President Richard Nixon was found guilty of all charges, and subsequently voted to remove him from office. Vice President Henry Griffith was thus next in line to become President, but he resigned from his office before he could be sworn in. This left the Speaker of the Assembly, Malcolm Wilkerson, to be sworn in as the 25th President of California, bringing a Progressive Party candidate into the Gold House once again.

The largest result of the "Crisis of '76" was the breaking of the Bear Flag Party. So many of its senior members had been caught and tried and removed from office, many of them even imprisoned, the party was severely crippled. At an emergency meeting of the party, it was decided that the party was in sore need of reorganization if it was going to survive. The meeting formally dissolved the Bear Flag Party, the longest-lasting political party in Californian history, and officially set forth the organization of the new Democratic Republican Party.

With the crisis over, President Wilkerson set about trying to restore order in California. His first speech as President made it clear that the Crisis was over. Setting about consolidating his power, he made it clear that since the crisis was over, the nation needed to look forward to the Membership Referendum, which was now just 5 months away. With the nation's political system crippled but returning to normal, the campaigns for remaining part of the NAU and for leaving the NAU began anew. The campaign for leaving had grown even stronger in the absence of a nationwide debate, with President Nelson Rockefeller of the USA insisting on "finishing the job in Vietnam" alongside President Robert Byrd in the CSA, while the leaders of the NAU in Canada, Mexico, Cascadia, Central America, and the Caribbean were calling for an end to the costly conflict. The NAU was shaking apart.

After much debating and waiting, the referendum finally came. On the 14th of November, the results came across the country: 61% voted against continued membership. California had effectively voted to leave the NAU.

The shock was immediate. The NAU's leadership was taken aback by California's decision to leave, but began making a plan for concessions to California in order to keep them members of the NAU, again reliant on their ports, but also increasingly on Californian agriculture as its own agricultural production declined. President Wilkerson, however, stood firm in the decision of the Californian people, stating that "The Referendum system is the political form of California's _vox populi_ , and it would be a subversion of democracy if I were to override the results of a Referendum." It was clear: California was leaving the NAU. Such a provision existed in the NAU's charter: Article 66. As such, on 2 February 1977, after several months of hammering out a plan, California formally began the process of leaving the NAU.

Even with this going on, however, President Wilkerson also brought into action another change at home: the first inter-state metro system in California. A project he'd been championing since he was elected to the National Assembly, the "Bay Area Rapid Transit System", or BART. While California entered the talks to end California's membership in the NAU, ground was broken in San Francisco. The planned system would center on San Francisco, and would stretch out to cities around the Bay Area: San Jose, Redwood, Sonoma, Concord, Livermore, and other cities would be connected to the Capital City, as well as being connected by other lines that avoided San Francisco.

As the "Exit Talks" continued, it became clear that the whole of the NAU wasn't a united front on the issue against California. Mexico and several other Central American nations were also starting to talk publicly about leaving the NAU, feeling dragged around by the USA and CSA. Canada was giving only tacit support on the issue, while Cascadia was entirely sympathetic to California's decision. In the far north, Alaska, which had been considering joining, quietly shredded its plans to join the NAU. California's negotiations with the NAU soon devolved into the USA and CSA trying to appeal to California, failing, and then making a concession. By June 1977, it was clear to the nations of the NAU that California had the upper hand. The final blow to the credibility of the talks came in July 1977, when California finally closed the ports of Redwood and Los Angeles to NAU soldiers leaving for Vietnam, at around the same time that Japan and Korea were declaring they wanted no more part of the conflict. Pressed for time, a hasty treaty was signed with the NAU sans California, GUN Security Council, and North Vietnam on a ceasefire that would establish the boundary set in the 1950s as a demilitarized boundary, pending a permanent peace treaty that would never come.

In March of 1978, the final documents of the Exit Talks were signed, sealed, and brought into effect. On 12 March 1978, the California Republic, a founding member of the NAU, formally left the Union. Treaties had been renegotiated, trade deals repackaged, and all in a way that resulted in minimal damage to California's economy, but left the NAU with a fatal wound. Just months later, votes came in from Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico, all stating the same thing: they wanted to leave. California's exit from the NAU had sounded its death knell.

Californians across the nation were happy again. Through the strength of President Wilkerson, the right man in the right place, the Crisis of '76 hadn't compromised California too badly, and it now emerged as a rapidly developing nation. The Cherrywood film industry was taking off, and that same year, California launched the Constellation Program, putting a Californian man into space for the first time. By 1979, the first BART route from San Francisco to Redwood was completed, and opened to much fanfare. President Wilkerson himself was present at the dedication, proudly declaring that California was entering a new age. By now, California's population had grown to 25.5 million people, and it showed no signs of slowing down.

The election of 1980 was far quieter than the decade that came before it. President Wilkerson announced that he would not stand for reelection, and the Progressive Party and Democratic Republican Party going up against each other for the first time. The Progressives nominated Edmund G. "Eddy" Brown in a successful campaign against Democratic Republican candidate Alonzo Berganza, the first Hispanic candidate of a major party for President since Felix Anzures in 1932. At 37 years old, he was the youngest President in many decades, as well as making a somewhat controversial move by having the political activist Cesar Chavez as his Vice President, a man with no other political experience but with a vast degree of traction in the Hispanic-Californian community.

In 1981, under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, the last three nations of the NAU were the USA, CSA, and Puerto Rico. The collapse of the NAU had left the economy of North America a complete mess, as many nations had left with far less cleaner breaks than California had achieved. While California set about building itself up, expanding the BART system and embarking on a modernization of the CalRail system, a series of intense and complicated negotiations between the three remaining nations of the NAU brought about the unthinkable: the reunification of the USA and CSA. The last three nations of the NAU formally united on the 23rd of September, 1981, forming the Federal Republic of North America. Canada briefly considered joining, but ultimately chose to stay with the Commonwealth of Nations.

In 1982, while Ronald Reagan chose to re-intensify the "Cold War", the rest of NATO was electing to try and de-escalate the war, distancing itself from Reagan's policies and attempting to find a peaceful resolution to the tension that would last once and for all. President Brown in particular made a historic visit to Beijing in April of 1982, opening the first diplomatic relations between the California Republic and the People's Republic of China. Many in the Chinese-Californian community criticized this, as many had come as refugees during the Chinese Civil War and others had escaped during the purges of Mao Zedong and weren't terribly partial to the Communist government. Brown, however, justified this by saying "China is a nation just like any other. If we are to properly interact with them, we must recognize them as such."

China in particular was eager to begin importing Californian agricultural products to help feed its colossal population, and a trade deal was soon hammered out that saw millions of dollars begin to get poured into California, along with a new market of cheap, mass produced goods that the consumer culture of California began to buy in droves. As good as this was for the consumer, many Californian manufacturers complained loudly and vocally about how the new deal was costing Californians jobs as demand for more costly Californian products declined sharply. Over the course of 1983 - 1985, as many as 35% of all manufacturing jobs in California were cut, hitting manufacturing centers such as Redwood hardest of all. In the manufacturing hubs of California, while jobs were slashed, crime began to spiral upwards as poverty increased. Almost as a direct consequence of the new trade deal with China, President Brown began to move money into more police funding for Redwood, San Diego, and Los Angeles as unrest grew with the economic uncertainty. The election of 1986 allowed the Democratic Republicans to capitalize on the climate of uncertainty about the future to propel the mayor of San Diego, María Fernanda Sáenz, to be the 26th President of California, the second woman to be elected President, and the first Hispanic-Californian elected President. Her inaugural address delivered a promise to crack down on crime and get the economy back on track, appealing to many who had lost their jobs and to those who felt threatened by the rising crime rates. Outside California, the formation of the Federal Republic of North America, the "FRNA", had reinvigorated the strength of NATO militarily, while cracks in the Warsaw Pact began to show as more nations began to slip out of the USSR's grasp, starting with a sudden coup in East Germany that saw the collapse of the communist government, and a somewhat hasty reunification of the two German nations. The Cold War was coming to an end.


	19. 1986 - 1999

Under the leadership of President Sáenz, California's subsidization of local police forces began to expand considerably, taking money out of CalRail to fund it while CalRail's ridership was in decline. Police forces began to swell in numbers and become more bold in anti-crime efforts, to the point where those arrested being proven innocent began to grow in number. While the overall crime rate began to level off its growth, by 1987 the projections for the first years of President Sáenz' administration failed to achieve predicted levels of crime rate reductions. Undaunted, Sáenz began to channel yet more money into police subsidies, further amplifying the prior effects.

Meanwhile, 1987 also saw the enactment of several protective tariffs against Chinese imported goods, intended to revive California's own flagging manufacturing industry. At once, China objected to California's attempt to slow down imports, since aside from the Soviet Union (which itself was falling to bits), California had become the PRC's largest trading partner. While exports to California began to decrease, the fallow industry of California proved slow to begin taking up the slack. Consequently, the economy began to stagnate without actually declining. As product shortages began to make themselves more apparent across the nation, public opinion began to turn against the tariffs, to the point where enough signatures were collected to threaten the process of a Referendum on the matter that the government quietly phased out the tariffs. Like it or not, California had become part of a globalized economy.

By 1988, President Sáenz's programs to revitalize California were clearly stagnating, even though some of them were producing lukewarm successes in several areas. The national crime rate had at least stopped rising, and the administration proudly proclaimed this whenever it could. The economy, however, was still stagnating, despite the government's best efforts to alleviate this. To make matters worse, inflation began to slowly but noticeably tick upwards, indicating a nightmare of economics known as "stagflation". Unless drastic action was taken at once, the economy of California was doomed to decades of stagnation.

It was to this end that President Sáenz pushed forward a bill to begin expanding oil drilling and extraction operations in the known oil fields of California, the largest of which were in Midway, along the Kern River, and most inconveniently of all, the southern portion of Los Angeles, right along the Port of Los Angeles, which had replaced Redwood as the largest port in California. These fields, some of the largest in North America, had been undergoing extraction operations since the 1890s, but with demand for money to be pumped into the economy, the Oil Extraction and Refinery Act of 1988 provided incentives for companies to increase their extraction in the oil fields to levels where export could be used as a viable way to pump money into the nation's economy. After many, many legal battles with state and local authorities over where and how much to drill, extraction began to grow in earnest, and oil exports began to grow.

1989 did open with the promise of economic recovery, as the growing oil exports, particularly to Cascadia and the FRNA, began to pump new life into the economy. The stagnation in the economy recovered, as it began to tick upwards once again, albeit still at a slow rate. Inflation was curbed by limiting the money supply, which did seem to help fix the problems of stagflation before they had truly started. All that was pushed aside in the public's mind, however, when in October of that year a 6.9 earthquake with its epicenter near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains struck without warning. While nowhere near as damaging as the Great Quake of 1906 that had almost flattened San Francisco, the damage was still readily apparent throughout the central coast of California. The San Francisco Bay Bridge suffered the collapse of part of its upper deck, while its sister, the Golden Gate Bridge, experienced cracking in its asphalt surface from the swaying of the deck. Several railroad bridges and highway viaducts collapsed, and many buildings that weren't properly built to earthquake codes suffered severe damage or collapsed completely.

San Francisco had suddenly had three of its main ways of getting in and out of the city cut off: the Golden Gate Bridge, Bay Bridge, and Transbay Tube of the BART system were all shut down due to either damage or damage control efforts. The only real ways in and out of the city were via San Francisco International Airport or the highway running up the San Mateo peninsula. Taking inspiration from the actions of President Leland Stanford II, President Sáenz made her way to San Francisco to oversee the reconstruction of the capital city. Unlike the 1906 Quake, the city hadn't been almost completely leveled, so another large-scale redesign of the city wasn't possible. What was possible, however, was the restoration of several older buildings of historical importance that had been damaged in the quake. At the same time, the Pan Am Tower had suffered a catastrophic amount of damage, to the point where the only sane thing to do was demolish what remained and sell the land to a new tenant. The winning bid went to a conglomeration of large Californian corporations, most notably California Communications, Salesway, and Calgen, who came together to propose a 314 m tall tower to be named the "Transbay Tower", which would become the tallest building in California as well as the tallest building in North America west of the Mississippi River. With a new, modern design that took into account every earthquake preparedness possible, the tower's construction began as soon as demolition of the old Pan Am Tower was completed in early 1990.

Oil exports continued to make California more and more money as the 1990s began, but in 1991, a new movement gathered together from both conservative and liberal Californians to oppose the proliferation of oil in California, citing new studies out of the University of California system that gave much more evidence for the theory of global climate change being driven by human actions. The "Muir Movement", so named for the famous environmentalist John Muir who had made the Sierra Nevada famous in the 1890s, began to call for stricter emissions standards, especially in places like the San Joaquin Valley, which had some of the worst air quality in the world. Fearing damage to the economy, President Sáenz only gave token considerations to the movement by enacting stricter standards on the most polluting facilities, such as coal power plants.

The election of 1992 came just as the most shocking news of the century broke: the Soviet Union had collapsed. As the last bits of the former Warsaw Pact fell apart, Prime Minister Michael Heseltine of the UK proclaimed "the End of History". Capitalism had prevailed, communism had failed, and now, only a few communist states remained around the world, most notably the People's Republic of China, but even that was getting shaky. With people demanding more action on climate change but with happiness from how the nation's economy was growing again, the election proved to be incredibly narrow. With only a few percentage points guaranteeing victory, the Democratic Republicans kept the Gold House but lost a lot of seats in the Congress to the Progressives. Curiously, owing to the strong environmentalist climate in politics at the time, a third-party candidate was elected to the National Assembly for the first time since 1940: Kent Smith of the Green Party, elected from the south bay city of San Jose to push for environmental reform. The new President was yet another first for California: Adam Cook, the new 27th President of California, became the first Mormon elected to the Presidency, as well as the first President to come from the eastern states of California.

In 1993, President Cook met with the leaders of the nations of North America at the Chicago Trade Summit to discuss a new free-trade zone that would operate similarly to the former anti-tariff zone that the former North American Union had once operated. The signatories to the treaty included California, the FRNA, Canada, Cascadia, and Mexico, but other nations of North America declined to attend. Among the propositions was a proposed "Amero" currency that would serve as a common unit of exchange for the nations of North America, replacing their old currencies. The initial proposal fell through, but an amended version allowed the Amero to be used as a secondary currency by the nations of North America. In California, the Amero was largely ignored at a local level, but large companies began to use them when trading on the international markets.

By 1994, the Senate and National Assembly had been filled with enough Progressives to force through legislation enacting strict emissions caps on most things that produced carbon dioxide, overriding several vetoes that President Cook had attempted to levy on them. By mid-1994, California had managed to bring into action several very strict emissions laws, which the opposition labeled as "draconian" and "economic suicide". Regardless of this, by 1994 California had grown into the world's 6th largest economy, driven by a population of almost 35 million in 1995. Increasingly, this population was connected more and more the internet, which was being fueled by the growth of technology giants that had begun making California their home, conglomerating around the city of Vallejo and lending San Pablo Bay the nickname of "Silicon Bay", especially after it became home to the massive new internet company "AlphaBeta", a company that started as a search engine but was taking off as it began moving into developing its own line of personal computers.

1996 experienced a new trend in California's economy: it was taking off, fueled by a soaring tech industry that was making California the capital of tech development for North America. While all this was going on, a new issue had come to the front of the political debate: marriage. Increasingly since 1988, a movement had begun to bring marriage equality in the form of legalization of gay marriage. The debate was a fierce one, with President Cook stating firmly that he would oppose any attempt to legalize gay marriage in any form. Regardless, several states had begun legalizing it on their own. The charge continued to be kept going forward until it was suddenly leant more power by a surprising revelation: Michael Thompson, a senator from Sierra Nevada, openly came out as gay during a speech he was delivering in the Senate, eliciting a massive national reaction that largely trended towards adding support to the cause of gay marriage. At this time, the very capital of California had become a center of gay activism, particularly in the South of Market neighborhood of the city. In a rather odd form of protest, on 16 April 1996, several activists managed to scale the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge and set up a massive rainbow flag to fly from it. It was taken down the next day, but for 10 hours after sunrise it was clearly visible, flying over the bridge and looming over the nation's capital.

In 1997, the world suddenly experienced the next great chaos when a failed internal coup within the Chinese Communist Party crumbled the leadership structure of the People's Republic of China, resulting in the complete collapse of the government in mere days once the people got wind and began to escalate the situation. With the collapse of the PRC, the last great communist power in the world had fallen, and communism was more or less completely dead, surviving only in the nations of North Vietnam and Laos. As China entered yet another brutal civil war for the second time that century, California was hit with a double-whammy. Not only was a major economic partner suddenly gone, but now the entire world had a massive influx of refugees from the civil war. It was estimated by the GUN that over 250 million people would be displaced at the minimum, and there was almost nowhere for them to go. Initially, refugees calling to California for help were rebuffed by the government, which wanted to retreat and lick its wounds after its economy had just taken a serious hit. However, the massive Chinese-Californian community took to the streets to protest for the accepting of refugees from California, many stating they would even open their own homes to take them in. Many non-Chinese Californians joined in the marches, until the government relented after 5 months of stalling on the issue. A quota of 200,000 refugees was established, and cities quickly began to organize how many would go where.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the way the Democratic Republican Party had been running things was a common theme in the 1998 election, Surprisingly, the DemReps put up a foreign-born candidate: Howard Sutherland, the State Treasurer of Shasta, who had been born and raised in England until he was 11, then had moved to California in 1955. As such, many jokingly refered to him as "King Howard I", since he still carried an English accent even during the election. A perception of his lack of awareness of California's issues and problems continued to hamper and cripple his campaign, however, and ultimately, the Progressive Party put yet another first into the office: former Mayor of San Francisco Daniel Han was elected to become the 28th President of California, and the first Chinese-Californian elected to the Presidency.

Within the first few months of his Presidency, President Han began to work on what he called "the newest era of reform". Among them was solidifying a strict series of emissions regulations in every part of the nation's infrastructure, most particularly beginning the process of electrifying the CalRail system to modernize it, with the ultimate goal of transforming it into a high-speed rail network capable of averages 200 km/hr. Cars were also subjected to a much stricter series of emissions regulations, which many auto manufacturers were more or less required to comply with if only for how large of an auto market California was. At the same time, Executive Order 13577, issued on 17 November 1998, struck down any federal distinctions between "straight" marriage and gay marriage, which rather than explicitly legalizing gay marriage (that would come in mid 1999) rather simply said it wasn't illegal and would be recognized as a legitimate union at the national level. The text of the Order also reserved the right to determine the legality of gay marriage to the national government, effectively eliminating state bans on gay marriage. The issue was taken to court almost immediately, but after a 6 month debate, the Supreme Court of California voted 5 to 2 in favor of the constitutional legality of Executive Order 13577. His championing of gay rights lead many to label President Han as "The First Gay President".

Around the world, the year 1999 was an uneasy one. In the Second Chinese Civil War, three nuclear devices had been detonated in Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin, causing ever more chaos and plunging the region into a deeper hell. The new Federation of Russia was unstable but managing to move along, its economy still shattered from the end of the USSR. The newly formed "European Union" was off to a good enough start, but unease was already growing among its members, most particularly the United Kingdom. Africa was undergoing several different revolutions and wars, but a stability was being reached, even if it was at a glacial pace. South America was working towards its own integration, even as civil unrest simmered in many of its nations.

In an unsure world, California continued onwards.


	20. End

**Friday, 31 December 1999**

 **11:54 PM**

 **Marin Headlands**

Amelia Stafford pulled off of Highway 13 as soon as she'd gotten over the Bridge, driving down a slipway that took her to a large flat area where there was just one other car. Sitting on the hood of the car was a Japanese man in his very early 20s, who smiled as soon as he saw her car pulling in. She got out and sat on the hood of his car with him. "Took you long enough. It's almost midnight."

"Hey, you try driving through San Francisco tonight."

"Fair enough." He chuckled and hugged her into him. "The city looks beautiful from here." He wasn't exaggerating. The span of the Golden Gate Bridge alone was decorated brightly with lights, while San Francisco itself shone brightly in the night, spotlights flashing through the sky. Over it all, the Transbay Tower had been lit up brighter than any of the buildings it dwarfed, while lights on its side showed the time. At that moment, it was reading for 11:55. The cheers and shouts of over a million people could be heard all the way across the Golden Gate, all of them waiting for the moment the new millennium began.

"You know, the 'new millennium' actually begins in 2001."

"What was that?"

He smiled. "There isn't a year zero, so 2001 is actually when the new millennium begins."

Amelia smiled. "Why do you gotta ruin the New Year, Takeshi? Can't these people just enjoy themselves?"

"What if I enjoy ruining the New Year?"

She giggled. "Then you need a new hobby."

The Transbay Tower was flashing out 11:56.

They sat in silence for a bit, until the tower flashed for 11:59, and the countdown of the final 60 seconds began.

"What do you want for the new millennium?"

Takeshi looked down at her, then smiled. "More of this."

"That's a bit too simple."

"Okay, then. I want us to do things like this more often."

30 seconds remained of 1999.

"We could do that, you know. If you were around more often."

"I don't decide when I get deployed."

"I know, I'm just being wishful."

"How many more years?"

"Two or three, I think. Then we'll be able to afford our own place. Where do you wanna go?"

"I've heard Merced is a nice place."

15 seconds.

"No, the Central Valley is way too hot. How about Eureka?"

"Too far north."

10 seconds.

"Well do you just want to stay in San Francisco?"

"Maybe. It's got almost everything I need, it's just really expensive."

5 seconds. They could hear people counting from all the way in the city.

"We'll figure it out. I know we will."

The clock ticked over. The Transbay Tower lit up in a brilliant white light, and fireworks screamed out of Alcatraz Island, illuminating the sky. The screams and cries and shouts from San Francisco echoed through the night. Takeshi smiled and kissed Amelia's temple.

"We always do."


	21. Author's Note

This is one of my favorite timelines when it comes to working with alternate history, and I consider it one of my "pet projects". If anyone is interested in this timeline, since I published it, I've been working on a more refined version that I host on my DeviantArt account, with stories, maps, logos, and other nice things that flesh out a timeline nicely.

Fair warning: some things have changed in this new version of the timeline, but it uses a lot of the same plots and events that can be found in this one. I borrowed heavily from this one when making the second version of an independent California Republic.

Thank you very much for reading, and I hope that it inspires you to make your own histories.

\- Mobiyuz -


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